


So Let the Stars Fall

by fuzzballsheltiepants



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: AFTG Big Bang, Demisexual Neil Josten, Estranged Aaron and Andrew, Family is hard okay, Friends to Lovers, Fun with Dinosaur Fossils, Grad Student Andrew Minyard, Grad Student Neil Josten, Kinda, M/M, Paleontology!AU, Racism, Thesis writing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-20
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2020-10-24 16:13:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 31,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20708876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fuzzballsheltiepants/pseuds/fuzzballsheltiepants
Summary: The newly discovered dinosaur fossil site in New Mexico is a good opportunity for PhD student Andrew Minyard to take a break from his complicated thesis and get some field experience.  He knew there would be a lot of hard work, hot sun, and irritating paleontology geeks.  He didn’t quite expect to discover a major new dinosaur species…or the sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued PhD student from Cambridge who notices too much and makes him feel too acutely.





	1. April

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bookhangover](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookhangover/gifts), [broship_addict](https://archiveofourown.org/users/broship_addict/gifts).

> This project has taken over my whole soul for the past 6 months so I hope you all enjoy it! I had the incredible good fortune to be able to work with the supremely talented Val [(@cats-are-assholes)](https://cats-are-assholes.tumblr.com) and Meghan [(@broship-addict)](https://broship-addict.tumblr.com), their art is absolutely amazing so please go give them some love! [Check out Val's two pieces,](https://cats-are-assholes.tumblr.com/tagged/if-you-want-context-go-read-the-fic%21) which will be relevant to chapters 6 and 8. And [Meghan's lovely comic](https://broship-addict.tumblr.com/post/187849548582/my-piece-for-the-aftgbigbang-its-an-upcoming) for chapter 5! I'll embed all of it when the appropriate chapters go up. Plan is to post every other day, so keep your eyes open for updates. 
> 
> Thanks as always to Nicole @tntwme for the beta, and Cory @foxsoulcourt for reading as I write to keep me motivated and asking the right questions. 
> 
> Glossary for this chapter:  
Cretaceous: the last section of the Mesozoic era, extending from 140 million years ago to 65 million years ago  
Hadrosaur: A late Cretaceous family of large herbivores, more commonly known as “duckbill dinosaurs.” Hadrosaurus is one genus within that family; Hypacrosaurus is another.

It was barely nine a.m., Andrew was fifty yards from his car, and he was pretty certain the earth was already trying to kill him. 

If he was being fair, it was the sun that was doing most of the hard work on that front, first defeating his air conditioning’s most valiant attempts to cool the car and now seeping in through the sides of his sunglasses. Not that the earth wasn’t a willing accomplice, the heat reflecting off the red-brown of the rocks until he felt like he was being set on fire from all directions. The fact that half the nearby plants were equipped with tiny knives did not improve the situation. 

He gulped down some water, then headed up the rock-strewn slope towards where he could see Wymack starting to set up an enormous tent. The ground gave under Andrew’s feet as he climbed, tiny gravel skittering down, sounding more ominous than it was. 

“What the fuck was I thinking when I agreed to this?” he asked as he slung his pack in the shade of a cactus the size of a pine tree. 

Wymack grunted and handed Andrew a mallet and a pair of tent stakes. “That you wanted to get your degree so you can go off and make someone else’s life miserable.” 

“That can’t be the reason.” Andrew went where Wymack pointed him and began hammering a stake into the ground. “You’re my favorite person to make miserable.” Technically, that was Kevin, but details. 

The stake wasn’t making much progress breaching the thin skin of packed dirt that covered the sandstone; he glanced out of the corner of his eye and saw that Wymack wasn’t having any better luck. Gritting his teeth in a grim sort of satisfaction, he squared his shoulders and shifted his grip on the hammer. Finally, finally, he felt it start to sink into the ground. He didn’t even try not to be smug when he was able to move onto the next one before Wymack. 

More than two hours later they finally had the tent erected and a row of formica tables set up. Andrew let himself flop to the ground in its shade, draining the last of his water. “Shit,” he murmured, shaking the empty bottle as if that would somehow cause the water to regenerate. Wymack eased himself onto one of the folding chairs; Andrew foresaw some vicodin in his professor’s future. 

It was stupidly peaceful, sitting there listening to the wind skittering sand and the unexpected symphony of the birds. He knew it wouldn’t last; the rest of the crew would be trickling in over the next week, and he had been preparing himself for a steady diet of chest-thumping and infighting. One would think that paleontology wouldn’t be a field open for arguments; after all, everything was literally set in stone. 

One would be wrong. 

Wymack had picked an international team, and Andrew still wasn’t sure why he thought having a Brit, an Irishman, a German, and a Frenchman all on the same dig was a good idea. Especially when according to all reports, the Brit was an asshole and the Frenchman a stereotype. And the Irishman was Kevin Day. _The _Kevin Day, who could somehow manage to hurt a fossil’s feelings. Kevin being Wymack’s son probably had something to do with it; the fact that he was one of the most sought-after post-docs in the world might have played into it somewhere too. 

After they sat and breathed in oven-baked air for a while, Wymack groaned his way to his feet. “Come on. Let me show you why we’re really here.” 

Stepping out from the shade of the tent was a punishment. He followed Wymack along the edge of the hill for a dozen yards, then stopped and looked where he was pointing. Maybe a quarter of the way down the steep slope, something was jutting out of the hillside. Andrew turned sideways and half-climbed, half-slid down the slope until he reached it. 

It was a femur. About half a meter of it was clearly visible; the rest was embedded into the rock. Andrew studied it, the diameter, the grooves that showed where muscles would attach. His hand could just about sink into one of those grooves. Which meant this was a big fucking dinosaur. 

He reached out, his finger hovering over it. He had handled fossils in the lab before, both real ones and casts. Memorized them, knew how they aligned, how tendons and ligaments held them together. Locomotion was his specialty, he had spent the past five years studying femurs and pelvises, feet and spines. He could describe it with the clinical detachment of an engineer, all mechanics and no magic, any childlike sense of wonder at the entire idea of dinosaurs long since researched into oblivion. 

But never before had he stood out under a sky so brightly blue it was almost white and felt the sun’s heat radiating off of the mineralized memory of what was once a living creature. It felt more real, somehow. Easier to believe that this bone—_this_ bone—had once helped a dinosaur walk the earth. 

Everything else dropped away. The baking sun, the trickles of sweat running down his back into his underwear, the thirst beginning to parch his throat. None of it mattered. He looked up at Wymack, standing on the edge of the ridge looking back at him, and met his small, fierce grin with one of his own. 

* * *

_At least we aren’t sleeping in tents,_ Andrew thought as he looked around the ancient bunkhouse. It was a stereotype out of a Hollywood movie, musty and rundown, sunlight sneaking through tiny crevices in the roof and setting the dust motes sparkling. Some idiot might call it romantic, a holdover from a more pure time or some such bullshit. Andrew sighed and vowed to head to the Walmart for a vacuum cleaner and some sheets. He dropped his bag on the top bunk and a cloud of dust rose to the ceiling. Maybe a new mattress, too. 

This was the only night he’d have the bunkhouse to himself. He wasn’t sure when Kevin was arriving, but had no doubt he’d claim the other top bunk. Nicky was coming tomorrow, and he would just assume he belonged with them. Andrew hadn’t seen his cousin since the previous summer, though they talked once a week; he was only going to have to deal with him now because Wymack had selected him to be the main mammal guy. Supposedly it was because Nicky had been published a few months ago in a prestigious journal about Cretaceous mammals, but Andrew knew it was some misguided attempt at a favor to himself. 

Who the fourth person would be was up for some debate. He doubted Renee would want to room with them, especially since a couple of her friends from undergrad were joining in. And while Andrew and his fellow PhD student Matt Boyd had an uneasy truce born of three years in the same lab together, they weren’t exactly about to trade friendship bracelets. Kevin knew a couple of the others, but Andrew trusted his judgment about as much as he would a dinosaur’s. 

He wasn’t sure if he would want Roland in with them or not. It was rather convenient he was going to be along on the dig, but sometimes Roland couldn’t keep his mouth shut. And Kevin’s obvious and unrequited crush on Knox meant that combo would be annoying as fuck. But that was a problem for another day. 

* * *

Wymack and Andrew were still setting up their equipment when dust plumes appeared along what passed for a road out here. He couldn’t see the car over the hill of rock; Renee, Dan Wilds, Allison Reynolds, and Boyd, probably. He turned back to stocking the kits everyone was going to be using once they were out in the field. Then the car came into view. 

Andrew knew that car. He knew every inch of it, inside and out. The scrape along the passenger’s side panel that had been the result of one too many shots at the club; the burn mark he himself had left in the driver’s seat upholstery with a careless cigarette. The stereo that still played fucking cassette tapes. He remembered when it had been purchased, seven hundred dollars in cash in exchange for the Civic that would never die. 

What he didn’t know is what the fuck it was doing here. 

He turned to Wymack and noted the guilt lurking behind the determined expression. “Roland broke his leg last week.” 

Of course he did. “How the fuck did he do that?” 

“He fell off his roof. There may have been some alcohol involved.” 

Andrew wondered briefly how he hadn’t learned about this before. But he had been at that conference in Chicago, and Roland would not have wanted to be the one to break the news. “And the only other available conifer asshole in the entire world happens to be my brother.” 

Wymack’s mouth twitched. “Well, given that the other PhD I pulled for botany was at Aaron’s lab, it made sense to ask him. Plus it’s only an eleven hour drive.” Andrew leveled him a look that earned another quirk of the mouth. “Just think, it’s a family reunion.” 

“I hate you and everything you stand for.” 

The car stopped just over the ridge. One door slammed, then the other. Andrew kept his eyes on the packs, studiously not listening to the sound of feet crunching on rock. Large chisel, medium chisel, small chisel. Dental picks. Brushes. He spun one in his fingers. Technically they were paintbrushes, purchased from a home improvement store by the case. A fleeting part of him wondered if there was some sort of prestige for being chosen to clear dust off of fossils, instead of spreading generic beige paint across a wall. Or were these brushes the pariahs of the brush community? He tucked the brush into its holder, shaking his head at himself. 

“Katelyn,” he heard Wymack say. Andrew reached for a new pack of brushes and kept his head down. “Aaron. Glad to have you. Thanks for joining us so last minute.” 

A woman’s voice answered with conventional pleasantries. Andrew could feel eyes boring into the top of his head. He could feel more than that; Aaron’s entire presence bumping up against him, even though he was still ten feet away. He knew what Aaron was thinking, but it wasn’t up to him to make the first move. After all, Aaron had been the one to walk away. 

Finally, slow purposeful feet headed over to the table. “Andrew.” 

“Aaron,” Andrew said, not looking up from the line of packs. 

Silence reigned for a moment until the woman—Katelyn—broke it with a question of what they could do to help. Wymack answered, and then there were more footsteps, heading away. Andrew dared to look up then; Aaron had taken up post at Katelyn’s side to listen to instructions, a few inches too close to be casual. 

Great. Fucking great. 

He pulled out his phone and found Bee’s texts from last night. She must have known; she talked to Aaron as much as she did to Andrew. He stared at the letters, trying to read between the white and blue lines, but there was nothing to be learned there. Maybe if he had called her, he would have heard it in her voice. He shoved his phone back in his pocket. 

Aaron came over again, and this time Andrew looked up. He wondered what they looked like to the others, if the tension he could see in Aaron’s frame mirrored the tightness he could feel in his shoulders. Aaron held his gaze with steady eyes. 

“What’s next?” 

It sounded mundane, ordinary; but there were layers beneath the words Andrew doubted the others could hear. Andrew swallowed against the dryness that never seemed to leave his throat out here, then reached underneath the table to grab a box that he tossed at Aaron. “Bags. Four per kit.” 

Aaron’s eyebrows went up, then he shook his head and bent to the task. They worked in a silence that may have seemed companionable until the kits were finished. In reality, it was like working with a stranger, both of them determined to see the job done. Andrew caught the other botanist glancing over more than once, her concern written across her face. He wondered what Aaron had told her, then pushed that thought away as unproductive. 

People arrived in waves over the course of the day, the post-docs from Palmetto flying in with Boyd that afternoon, then Knox and Nicky landing that evening. Nicky attempted to hug Andrew, gave up when Andrew brandished a chisel, and promptly fell asleep fully dressed on his bunk. Knox stayed up talking to absolutely everyone, and Andrew was relieved Wymack had elected to assign cabins and had stuck Knox in with Aaron instead. 

The evening was a symphony as he took a walk around the cabins, birds calling, insects buzzing, the occasional deep lowing of cattle like the rumble of drums. He pulled his phone out and called the first person in his contact list. “Why didn’t you tell me he was going to be here?” 

Bee sighed from two thousand miles away. “He asked me not to.” 

Andrew stopped on the edge of a shallow slope, watching the shadowy forms of birds flit between the cacti. “You’re not supposed to play favorites.” 

“Yep,” she said cheerfully. “This is me doing exactly that. As you know.” 

He did know, but that didn’t mean it didn’t piss him off anyway. “How long have you known?” 

“He called right after Dr. Wymack made him the offer.” She paused, then went on, more quietly, “This is a good opportunity for him as well.” 

It was; of course it was. A brand new site, unexplored and unknown, with quality fossils right on the surface? Aaron would be a fool to turn it down. “He probably shoved Roland off the roof himself,” he muttered, and Bee laughed. 

“If he could do that from Utah, I’m impressed.” 

“Maybe he hired a hitman.” 

“Now, now, don’t be sexist.” 

Andrew almost laughed, and he felt the knots in his shoulders ease as they settled into one of their familiar routines. “Hitwoman? Hitperson.” 

“Better. We shouldn’t gender people we don’t know.” 

He could hear something clinking in the background, and a faint rustling. “Getting ready for bed?” 

Bee hummed. “Making some sleepytime tea. I made some lemon cookies earlier.” 

“When can I expect my delivery?” 

She laughed. “Text me your mailing address. Now. Tell me all about the site. Is it amazing? Have you found anything yet?” 

So he told her. About the sun and the rocks, the cacti and the little lizards that kept scurrying into the tent. About the femur, and how he was aching to finish uncovering it, to see if his theory about the species was right. About Nicky, and Katelyn, and Knox. He talked until he could only see his own hands by the faint light of the stars and sleep was creeping over them both. 

* * *

The next morning was spent on final setup of equipment and initial surveying of the area. Nicky talked Andrew’s ear off as they combed over the newly exposed rock, carefully noting the locations of pieces of bone. Dan and Renee set up the cameras and went through photographing every inch of the site. Kevin arrived as soon as all the grunt work was done and everyone was breaking for lunch, naturally. He had flown in from an international conference in Germany, dragging the Europeans with him, and they had stayed the night in Albuquerque. 

Andrew watched with interest as a stereotypically shitty old pickup, complete with rust spots and what sounded like a failing muffler, took its place next to the Civic. He wondered how Kevin had ever let his oversized ego be forced into something so shabby. A series of unacceptably tall people poured out of the small cab. Andrew was forcibly reminded of a clown car, and he dragged his attention back to the initial geological survey he had been studying. 

There was movement at his shoulder, and he didn’t have to look to know it was Aaron. It wasn’t some mystical twin bullshit. It’s just, when you spend most of your life with someone, you never quite forget the shape of their soul pressed against yours. Aaron set in to note fossil locations in the laptop, and they both studiously ignored the scrambling of feet on gravel and the explosion of voices as everyone talked over each other at once. 

Wymack called the group to attention. “We’re all here now, so it’s time to get down to actual work. For those of you who don’t know, this is Kevin Day, one of my post docs; next to him is Jean Moreau, our carnivore expert from France; this is Erik Klose, we rented him for a couple of weeks from the University of Stuttgart so he’s going to help us with all our urgent geology needs; and then this is Neil Josten. He wrote that hadrosaur paper that got everyone up in arms a few months ago.” 

Andrew’s attention immediately fixed on Josten. He was up to a foot shorter than the other three, slightly built and plainly dressed. Tucked in between Kevin and Moreau, he seemed to be doing his best to camouflage himself, a hare in a den of foxes. He should have been easy to ignore; but there was a sharpness in his eyes as they scanned the group that belied the blandness of his expression. 

That sharpness fit better into what little Andrew knew about the man. His first published paper had taken the legs out from under the most popular theory about how hadrosaurs chewed. The previous belief—that the teeth in the upper jaw hinged in and out as the jaw opened and closed—had made next to no sense to Andrew but he had spent little time on it, locomotion and gait analysis being more his area of interest. But the research that had led to that theory had been put out by one of the aging titans of paleontology, and it was one of the most widely-held tenets in the field, taught in universities and museums around the world. 

Josten’s paper had shot so many holes in the pre-existing theory that the paleontology community was basically wailing, “Stop, stop, it’s already dead.” Somehow, using math, CT scans, and a computer program he had coded himself, Josten had managed to prove, based on jaw angles and grooving of teeth, the exact chewing motion of a creature that had been extinct for almost seventy million years. 

Those too-sharp eyes met Andrew’s and held his stare. There was a hint of cool amusement behind them, and it pulled Andrew in like a whirlpool. He mentally shook himself, not breaking eye contact. This was not what he was here for. 

“Neil.” Kevin dragged Josten’s attention away, pulling him towards the slope. Andrew’s breath came easier, and he turned his focus back to the map. 

The tent at dinnertime that night was raucous; it didn’t bode well for days to come. Andrew debated grabbing some food and escaping to his cabin, or his car, but Wymack’s voice stopped him before he could load up his plate and disappear. “Team meeting!” 

They gathered around the long table, setting paper plates down among the first samples of rock and fossilized bone that had been collected. Wymack went through the plan for the next day, Kevin a too-earnest backup next to him. Superficial collection of the fossils on the surface, separation into categories—dinosaur, mammal, amphibian, plant, unknown— for later sorting, all the stuff he and Andrew had sorted out over the past couple of days. Dan reviewed collection of fragile specimens, Renee the mapping and labeling, and Kevin the sampling of associated rock for accurate dating. 

When they finally shut up, Andrew’s second escape attempt was aborted by Knox turning to Josten. “Neil, that paper, man. I was ready to call the police and report a murder. You went after Tetsuji’s whole soul with that thing, it was amazing.” 

Josten flushed and glanced at Kevin. “I wasn’t trying to go after anyone in particular.” 

Andrew snorted at the obvious lie and everyone looked at him. “You practically put a neon sign in there calling him incompetent. But I wouldn’t worry, it’s not like Tetsuji has a soul anyway.” 

Everyone but Kevin laughed. “It was too risky,” Kevin said. “You’re a third-year PhD student. It could have ruined your career.” 

“Could have,” Josten said, rolling his eyes with the air of someone who had had this argument many times. “Didn’t. Come on, Kev, just because Moriyama’s used to having his ass kissed every other minute doesn’t mean he can’t be proven wrong about stuff.” 

Knox was grinning. “Don’t tell me you didn’t get a little bit hard when you read that paper, Kevin. It was a work of art.” 

“He did,” Andrew confirmed. “I was there when he read it.” 

Kevin shot him a glare that Andrew met with an impassive look. “I hate all of you,” Kevin said, a red flush creeping up the back of his neck. The others laughed, and Andrew used the distraction to make his escape. 

He showered off the heat and dust and sweat of the day, then climbed into his bunk with his backpack full of books. Sorting through, he pulled out the novel Bee had sent him the previous week and settled into his pillow. He’d gotten a couple chapters in when the screen door to the cabin creaked open and he glanced over, expecting Nicky or Kevin. 

It was Josten, toting a beat-to-hell duffel and a wary expression. Glancing over the empty bunk, he swung his bag up to the top and coughed at the dust that rose. Andrew tried to lose himself in the pages of his book, but the quiet sounds of Josten moving around, making his bed, picked at the fibers of his concentration. Eventually the room went silent, and Andrew looked up to see him leaning against his bunk. 

“So you’re Andrew Minyard,” Josten said, in that accent of his that was definitely not attractive in the least. 

“Maybe. Word has it there’s two of us.” 

Josten’s mouth quirked in a knife-edged smile. “Unless the professor introduced you wrong.” 

Andrew sighed and dropped his book on the bed. “What do you want, Jordan?” 

“It’s Josten. Neil, actually. I got enough of being called by my last name in school.” 

“Okay, then, what do you want?” 

He shrugged, and there was an edge to his smile. “To see what Kevin was talking about. He said you’re an asshole. He also said you were brilliant. ‘Breaking ground in the mechanics of movement,’ or something like that.” 

Andrew’s skin crawled. He hated that word, brilliant, and all that came with it. Hated the layers of implications, the unspoken—or spoken—allegations of laziness, of stubbornness, of willful contrariness that had followed him since he had turned down the opening at Edgar Allen and gone to Wymack’s baby lab instead. He waited for the follow-up questions, hearing them in Kevin’s demanding voice instead of Neil’s soft accent. _Why haven’t you been published. Why didn’t you go to Edgar Allen, or Yale, or Columbia. Why why why—_

When nothing came, he gave in and asked, “So?” 

“So maybe I want to learn more about locomotion.” 

Andrew dug around in his bag and tossed a book at Josten. “Start there.” 

Josten glanced at the title and tossed it back. “I’ve read it.” 

“There you go then. Run away now.” 

“This is my cabin too.” 

“No shit.” Andrew immersed himself in his book until Josten spoke again. 

“Why is that, by the way?” 

Sighing ostentatiously, Andrew let his book drop. “Why is what?” 

“Your brother is here, yet I’m rooming with you and he’s in with Jean and them. A bit strange, no?” 

“Take it up with Wymack, he made the room assignments.” 

Neil didn’t answer, just dug around in his bag and headed into the miniscule bathroom. The shower cut on, and Andrew finally was able to concentrate. Not that the book was particularly taxing on his faculties, but it was both entertaining and gay, and that was enough for the moment. Bee always knew what he needed. 

He’d maybe read five pages when Kevin and Nicky came in, the former with his feathers ruffled and the latter grinning. Kevin scowled at Neil’s stuff on the top bunk, then set to work tugging bedding out of a bag. Nicky flopped onto his bunk and poked the underside of Andrew’s with his feet. “Hey, at least we get some eye candy, right?” 

Andrew ignored him. He wasn’t wrong, but Andrew didn’t want to encourage this line of thought. No doubt they were all straight anyway. Well, except for Kevin, who was off-limits despite his flexibility in that regard. 

But Nicky would not be ignored. He poked the bottom of Andrew’s mattress again. “Are you not even going to talk with me about how hot all the Europeans are? I mean damn, Erik is...wow. Jean’s kind of got the scary French thing going, but I can admire from afar, right? And Neil is just your—” 

Belatedly, Andrew realized the shower had stopped. “Shut up, Nicky.” 

“C’mon, Andrew—” 

“No.” 

“Fine. But I don’t see why you won’t let yourself enjoy it. I mean seriously, did you see that ass?” 

“These are your colleagues, Nicky,” Kevin interjected. “They deserve to be treated with respect.” 

“I can respect them and also think they’re hot. I mean, you respect Knox, right?” 

Kevin opened his mouth, no doubt to deny his obvious and pathetic crush, but the bathroom door clicked open. Neil emerged, hair all over the place from having been toweled off, t-shirt clinging to the moisture on his body, and absolutely proving Nicky one hundred percent right. Andrew forced himself to look away, but not before he caught the reserved mask that had taken over Neil’s expressive face. 

A heavy silence fell. Finally, Neil said, “Shower’s free,” then he shoved his feet into his shoes and disappeared through the door. 

“Shit.” There was actual regret in Nicky’s voice. Andrew forcibly relaxed his hands before they damaged his book. After all, it wasn’t like it mattered. They were here to do the job, and nothing else. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The finding of the fossils has begun, and amidst the celebration Andrew finds himself feeling a bit pensive. But he's not the only one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A quick thank you to @spires-to-heaven for helping me with finding the correct French phrase, my high school French had not prepared me. And thank you as always to @tntwme for the beta!
> 
> Glossary:  
Multituberculates - a branch of small, rodent-like mammals with distinctive chewing teeth. They are the only group of mammals to have gone completely extinct, with no living descendants.

Fuck the sun. 

Fuck the sun, and the heat, and the rocks. 

Fuck the burn settling into his skin despite his sunscreen. Fuck the indents in his knees from crawling across the ground. Fuck the blisters forming on his hands through his gloves. 

Andrew finished off yet another bottle of water and sat back on his heels. The others were dotted across the landscape, everyone doing the same thing as he was. It was kind of freaky, really, how there were fossils just kind of sitting there, some masquerading as gravel, some barely embedded in the rock, eager to be freed with a few chisel strokes. Andrew still found it hard to believe, one rainstorm in the desert and suddenly an entire long-dead ecosystem was exposed. 

Kevin and Moreau were arguing in vociferous French, for what may have been the seventeenth time that day. Andrew swiveled his head around to glare at them; neither of them noticed. If he had to guess, based on the occasional English word and the direction of the gesticulations, this argument was about which heap of rocks was the discard pile. Again. He glanced at Neil, who was stubbornly digging with a chisel at a small rib bone arching out of the rock and pretending the other two were not shouting directly over his head. 

The argument got louder, until heads were starting to turn in their direction. Neil stood, putting a hand on each of their chests, and snapped, “Oh, c'est bon là!” Kevin opened his mouth, no doubt to keep right on yelling, but Neil gave him a little shove and he stumbled a step backwards on the uneven ground. Moreau crossed his arms but remained quiet, watching Neil warily. Andrew had to bite his cheek to keep from laughing at the image. It reminded him of two large dogs being cowed by a kitten. 

A whoop came up from over the lip of the slope, and Andrew got to his feet and climbed to the edge to see what was going on. Katelyn was cheering, while Aaron cradled something gently in his palm. It was an irregular mass of brown mineral; most people would have stepped right on it as if it were nothing, but it was not nothing. No; it was a whole plant cone, a bit squashed, but whole. 

A smile, small but true, softened Aaron’s face as the others gathered around. Andrew watched him until he was swallowed up by the others, then turned back to his designated spot. The cone would help them to start to narrow down the era they were dealing with, even before the rock samples Klose had gathered for testing could be shipped off. 

He plucked another tooth off the ground, this one with a fragment of jaw still left. He marked it, then plotted it, glancing over at the femur end that was still jutting out of the rock a few yards away. That femur would tell a huge part of the story, but for now they were leaving it be, gathering up the surface before they disrupted everything by digging. 

Nicky clambered up the slope to him. “Look what I found!” 

It was tiny, no bigger than a postage stamp, but somehow perfect. A jaw, almost all the teeth intact, bits of sandstone still adhered along the bottom where Nicky had chipped it out. It was mammalian, Andrew knew that, but he couldn’t have narrowed it down any further. 

Kevin heard him and came over to investigate. “Nice specimen.” Neil looked up from where he was crouched, then turned his attention back to the ground. Andrew had noticed Neil was rarely within arm’s length of Nicky. Not that he blamed him. 

“Right? It’s beautiful!” Nicky stroked it gently, as if it were still alive and he could somehow comfort it. “I’ll have to double check with the magnifiers to know for sure what it is though.” He scrambled off to put it safely in the tent and Kevin looked at Neil and Jean. 

“We should go in too.” 

“You should go in, you mean,” Neil said, but he followed willingly. He never seemed to get tired; even when the rest of them were draped all over chairs in the tent like awkward lions, he was in motion. Cleaning, sorting, cataloguing. Andrew shook his head and trailed after them. 

There was still daylight, but night was creeping across the ground. Somehow it managed to be even hotter, as if the sun was literally sinking closer to the earth. It was easier to understand myths out here; like the barriers between science and ancient beliefs had frayed in the heat. 

The tent seemed more full somehow, people milling around munching on hamburgers while they sorted fossils. It had only been a couple of days, but people had already separated into groups. Aaron and Katelyn worked together, occasionally joined by Knox or Nicky; Kevin and Neil were connected at the hip, with Moreau the third wheel and Knox a satellite; Renee, Allison, Dan, and Matt were constantly together, just like at PSU. Nicky seemed to have somehow managed to charm Klose; they were eating together again, and the German was laughing at something Nicky said. 

Andrew got his own food, downed what felt like his eighteenth bottle of purple gatorade, and sat down to go through his finds for the day, matching the numbers carefully penned on the fossils to the map, then segregating into dinosaur, mammal, and who-knows-what. Kevin hovered for a little while, but drifted back to Neil and then out of the tent altogether when Andrew ignored him. By the time he had gotten through all the teeth and fragments of bone, he was yawning and bleary-eyed. 

He was the last person to the cabin, and the shower was out of hot water by the time he got to it but he didn’t even care. Everyone was drowsing in their bunks when he finished, and he would have happily ignored them all and gone to sleep except Nicky couldn’t allow that. 

“When are we going to dig out that femur?” he asked the dark cabin. “What if it’s something cool, like a T. rex.” 

“It’s a hadrosaur,” Andrew said without thinking. 

“A duckbill? That’s so boring though. I want it to be something cool.” 

“What’s wrong with hadrosaurs?” Neil asked, and Andrew bit the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing at the indignation in his voice. Somebody was a bit defensive about his favorite dinosaur, hmm? 

“They’re like, cretaceous cows.” 

“Fitting, then, that we’re on a cattle ranch,” Andrew said. 

Nicky grumbled into his pillow, then gave a yawn Andrew could feel in his bones. “How do you even know it’s a duckbill? You can only see, like, a third of one bone.” 

“What, and you can’t tell one stupid rodent from another based on one tooth?” 

“They’re not rodents, they’re multituberculates. And that’s not an answer,” Nicky complained. 

“Muscle attachment. It’s too low on the bone to be anything else.” 

“Well, I still think it’s going to be something cooler.” 

“Ugh, go the fuck to sleep, Nicky,” Kevin said. “We’ll figure it out when we dig it out in a couple of days.” 

Andrew wormed his way under his sheet and pressed his back against the wall. He could feel Neil’s eyes on him in the dark; he didn’t know if Neil agreed with him or not, and he told himself he didn’t care. He was right, and pretty soon they’d all know it. 

* * *

Wymack supervised the unveiling of the femur, the rest of them taking turns with the chisel as they worked, millimeter by slow millimeter, to free it from the sandstone. Andrew had just finished his turn and was silently sweating himself to death when Knox swore softly. “Uh, Coach?” 

Wymack looked up from where he and Klose were reviewing the stratigraphy at the sound of his nickname. “Problem?” 

“Not exactly.” 

A current of excitement rippled through the camp, pulling everyone in. Andrew was closest, so he was the first to see what Knox was staring at. One chunk of rock had slid free, revealing a string of vertebrae that disappeared into the hillside, and what looked like foot bones tucked underneath. 

“Looks like we’ve got a bit more than we bargained for, huh.” Knox glanced up at Wymack with a blinding smile. The others were starting to crowd around, and Andrew’s skin was crawling. He shrugged his way through the ring of sweaty bodies and headed up into the shade to let them all gush their little hearts out. 

The rest of the afternoon was taken up with planning the excavation of the skeleton. Everyone seemed caught up in the technicalities of it. While Klose went on to Moreau and Knox about the necessary equipment, Kevin, Wymack, Dan and Matt were arguing whether they should transport the chunks of bone-containing rock to PSU whole or if they should start removal of the larger fossils here. 

It was inevitable that Wymack would win on that one, and that the rock would be shipped back to PSU in giant blocks. It didn’t make sense to try to free them here, where they risked loss of fragments to the dust and dirt. Andrew’s head was aching from the noise and heat and pulsing energy. Nicky and Aaron had headed into town shortly after the discovery; they reappeared with a case of shitty beer and two bottles of tequila in tow just as Andrew was ready to flee. 

He snagged a bottle of tequila, ignoring Aaron’s whispered, “Andrew, you can’t…” It was blessedly quiet out in the darkening twilight, the air finally cooling enough to prickle the sweat on his skin. His car was waiting for him, but his feet carried him towards the skeleton instead. 

A shadow was crouched on the slope. A slender shadow, with sharp eyes that found his as he picked his way along the faint path their feet had started to wear into the dirt. Neil stood as Andrew got closer, his arms wrapped around himself as if he was cold. He didn’t say anything, and Andrew didn’t either. 

The fossils were nearly invisible in the dim light, just irregular shapes. Andrew reached out and ran his fingers over the newly exposed surfaces, feeling the difference in texture between rock and rock-that-used-to-be-bone. It was still warm from baking in the sun, and for a fleeting second he could picture it: the air sultry and green-smelling instead of dry and dusty, the rumble of heavy feet against the earth, the lapping of lake water against the long-dead shore. 

For just a moment, he felt like he was in two places—two times—at once. 

The tequila smelled faintly like zucchini, and for some reason it seemed to fit with the scene he was painting in his head. Putting the bottle to his lips, he grimaced a little at the funky taste, but the burn down his throat was welcome. Silently, he held the bottle out to Neil, who shook his head, and then capped it. Regardless of what Aaron thought, he wasn’t an idiot. He knew how alcohol mixed with his meds. 

“It’s crazy, isn’t it?” Neil murmured. Andrew glanced at him sideways. “Like, I know dinosaurs were real, but they always kind of felt...I don’t know, impossible. Like figments of our imagination. But look at this. Look at what we just found.” He rubbed a hand up his sunburnt neck. “This really happened. Eighty-something million years ago, they were standing right here. And now they’re gone.” He laughed, and there was something almost painfully sad in the sound. “Never mind.” He turned away, towards the cars. 

Andrew knew he should let him go. Neil was Kevin’s pet, after all, or maybe it was vice versa. But he had never seen this sense of—of awe from Kevin, or really from any of the others. The words came out before he could stop them. “I know what you mean.” 

Neil looked back over his shoulder, the moonlight silvering the planes of his face. All his bristling reserve was gone, and he seemed somehow younger without its armor. Younger, and impossibly more beautiful. Especially when a slow smile spread across his face, a marked contrast to the usual one that was quick and sharp as a blade. 

“You’re right, you know,” Neil said, picking his way back up the hill. “It’s a hadrosaur.” 

“I know.” 

“Nicky will be disappointed.” 

Andrew huffed. “Not sure why someone who is making a career of studying extinct rodents is being so critical.” 

Neil’s laughter was like music from another room; Andrew wanted to get closer to it, but it might disappear if he moved. “They’re multituberculates, Andrew,” he scolded mockingly. 

“They’re glorified mice.” 

Neil’s response was swallowed up in familiar voices from the top of the ridge. It was Aaron and Katelyn, pausing on the edge to kiss before heading down to the cars. Andrew watched as they passed, wondering if they even noticed him standing there, or if they were too lost in each other to care. 

“What’s the deal with you two?” Neil asked as the Civic’s door closed behind Katelyn. 

“What, Kevin didn’t tell you?” He cursed himself as the words left his mouth; he should’ve just stayed silent, or passed it off as nothing. 

“It didn’t have anything to do with dinosaurs. Therefore—” 

“It’s irrelevant. Yeah.” Andrew shook his head. “How do you know Kevin so well?” 

“You answer first.” 

That was fair. Andrew took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Aaron and I both got offers at PSU and Chicago. He decided to go to Utah instead.” 

“And that was a problem.” 

Andrew shrugged. He didn’t have the words to explain it further, even to Bee. She had understood anyway. 

Neil didn’t press. “I’ve known Kev since we were kids.” Andrew’s surprise must have been evident even in the dark because Neil gave a short laugh. “Yeah. We met at science camp.” 

It was strange, that Kevin hadn’t mentioned that. Technically it wasn’t important for the dig. But somehow, Andrew doubted that was why he kept it quiet. He thought back across what he knew about Kevin. “When was that?” 

“Ah, I was about ten?” 

So Kevin would’ve been twelve...and his mother would’ve been already sick with the cancer that took her life the following year. He rarely talked about her, but Andrew knew her work; everyone did. Even lay people knew about Kayleigh Day. Before Kevin was even born she had discovered a T. rex skeleton on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation that was so close to complete it had made international news. Now Kayleigh the T. rex was on display at Edgar Allen Museum of Natural History, with its own Twitter account and a fan club that numbered in the millions. 

Other people were filtering out of the tent now, and Neil edged away, calling out to Kevin to hurry his ass up. Andrew watched them as they headed towards Neil’s god-awful truck, the way Kevin’s shoulders relaxed even as they bitched at each other about some nonsense. Knox said something Andrew couldn’t hear, and Moreau nudged him before kissing his cheek. They were laughing as they wedged themselves into the cab, and Kevin turned to face Andrew. He couldn’t see Kevin’s expression with the truck’s cab lights behind him; when he didn’t move, Kevin shrugged and slammed the door shut. 

There wasn’t a name for the wordless ache in his chest. He turned back to the hillside, but there were no answers among the stones. 

* * *

“We can’t just call it FXR3742,” Nicky said, standing with his hands on his hips next to the plaster jacket encasing the femur. Andrew still wasn’t sure quite why the fact that the fossil went from one prison to another bothered him. It wasn’t like the rock cared, yet he had to fight the impulse to free it. 

“That’s its specimen name.” Kevin should have known by then that the tactic of authoritative stubbornness would never work on Nicky. Andrew leaned against the tent pole and sipped his water. Might as well enjoy the show. Across the tent, Neil was doing the same. 

“I don’t care. His name is Donald, end of discussion.” 

Irritation crawled across Andrew’s skin, but it faded when Kevin started turning purple. “Donald? No. Absolutely not.” 

“It’s a duckbill. His name is Donald. You’re just going to have to deal.” 

“But that’s not...Hadrosaurs didn’t even really have duck bills. It’s scientifically inaccurate!” 

“It’s a good name,” Klose chimed in. Andrew looked at him narrowly. The German was utterly unself-conscious, flashing Nicky a fond smile. “We want people to be excited about this. ‘Donald’ will draw people in. Then we can educate them.” 

_We._ As if Klose was going to have anything to do with this dinosaur after he went back to Germany in five days. As if Nicky would. It was Kevin and Wymack and Boyd and Andrew who would be doing the rest of the work. They’d all be saddled with this dumb-ass name for the rest of their careers while Nicky went off and played with palm-sized creatures nobody cared about. 

Kevin looked about ready to have a seizure. Neil ducked his head to hide his smile, meeting Andrew’s eyes with silent laughter. A tiny thrill went through Andrew. He didn’t know when he’d last had a secret joke with someone who wasn’t Aaron or Bee; maybe never. 

“I can’t believe this,” Kevin said, shaking his head. “You can’t seriously think this is a good idea.” 

“Coach will,” Nicky said. 

“It’s unprofessional.” 

“Your mom had a dinosaur named after her! And that’s not even like, the worst your-mama joke ever, it’s literally true.” 

Evidently Neil had had enough; he slipped out of the tent. Andrew drained his water and followed. Ultimately it was in Wymack’s hands anyway. 

Neil glanced up when Andrew joined him. He looked like he wanted to say something, but he picked up one of the pickaxes instead. They were still working to remove the top layers of rock from the rest of the hadrosaur skeleton, every day revealing a little bit more. 

They worked in silence for a while, carefully sorting through the rubble they made to check for any hidden fossils. When one large chunk was broken up Neil stood up as if to stretch his back, but Andrew could see his eyes darting around, taking everyone in before kneeling again to sort through the rubble. “I wish he wouldn’t talk about Kevin’s mom. Nicky, I mean.” 

“He’s never had much of a filter.” It wasn’t true, actually. When Bee had hunted down Aaron’s and Andrew’s remaining “family”, Nicky had been so deeply in the closet he’d been nothing but filter. Every word out of his mouth a carefully constructed lie he wanted so desperately to believe; a hologram of himself, designed to please people who had never been worth pleasing. 

Turns out being disowned by your family could do wonders for your expressiveness. 

The problem was, Andrew wasn’t sure if this version of Nicky was any more real. It felt like he had opted to own every stereotype, taken on the skin of a thousand caricatures. He wondered if Nicky even knew where he ended and the act began. 

Neil picked up a bigger chunk of rock and tossed it in the vague vicinity of the discard pile. It bounced off and rolled down the hill towards where Matt was futzing around with something. Andrew watched as it veered off and bounced past him harmlessly, coming to rest in the small spiky grass at the base of the slope. “Gutterball. You suck at this sport.” 

“I wasn’t aiming for him.” 

“Yeah, you say that now.” 

Neil laughed and sifted through more of the loose rock before giving up and sitting back on his haunches. For once even he looked a little flushed from the sun and exertion, and Andrew made himself look away. Neil might be friendly with him, but they weren’t friends, and he could not let himself forget that. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for the response!!! Hope you enjoyed this chapter, and I am loving all the wonderful comments!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A thunderstorm sweeps through the site, leading to some unexpected conversations.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for a scene with a racist interaction involving Nicky near the end of the chapter. There is no violence and no abusive language involved, but he is still targeted. Thank you to ly @adverbialstarlight for the sensitivity read here, and as always to @tntwme for the beta.

Andrew couldn’t sleep.

The air was heavy; the desert too quiet through the open windows. There was a tightness behind his eyes, a whisper of a headache creeping in like fog. The only sound was the rhythmic breathing of the others as they slept, oblivious to the weight that was slowly choking him.

He dropped out of the top bunk as quietly as he could. The art of silence was one he had learned long ago. Even the rusty hinges on the screen door obeyed him, and he found himself out on the small porch, gulping down air that offered no relief.

Something moved between the cacti and rough brush, a shadow of deeper black against the darkness, too low to the ground to be a cow. Gravel shifted. Andrew slipped off the deck, pulled in by the mystery. A part of him wondered if this was some sort of dream, if he had been dropped into the ancient landscape he’d been helping to uncover; if this was a monster come back to life.

The creature heard him and turned its head, its eyes a sudden gleam as they caught the distant moonlight. It made an odd sound, somewhere between a bark and a squeal, and he almost laughed at himself for the sudden wave of disappointment that swept through him. A javelina, one of the wild pigs of the desert. A monster in its own right, given the tusks he could see glistening as they stared at each other, but of the more ordinary kind.

The javelina grunted and stomped a hoof, then turned and disappeared into the night, the sounds of it fading more rapidly than should have been possible. Andrew slumped onto the deck, feeling the adrenaline drain from his body. The headache was muttering at him now, quiet but insistent. He wanted to go back to bed but it would be fruitless; the faintest streak of orange had just begun to glow on the horizon and the others would be up soon.

As if summoned by his thoughts, the door to the next cabin creaked open, revealing a rumpled Aaron, like Andrew still in his sleep shirt and boxers. Aaron seemed unsurprised to see him, picking his way carefully across the dirt. “Headache?”

Andrew nodded. It was one of the few things other than a face that they shared, internal barometers that foretold the weather by attempting to pound their brains through their skulls. At least once the rain hit the pressure would ease, but it was the desert; Andrew wondered if the relief would be swallowed up by the endless sand.

Aaron settled onto the deck next to him, pulling his knees up to his chest. For a moment, it was like when they were ten, and Bee had just adopted them. They had sat side by side on her porch, watching the rain sweep across the lawn in sheets, and had made each other promises they never should have tried to keep.

“How is Bee?” Aaron asked after the silence had soaked into them, down to their bones.

“You talk to her as much as I do.”

Aaron shrugged, shoulders tight, whether from pain or frustration Andrew couldn’t tell. “Yeah, but you were there a few weeks ago.”

“She’s...Bee.” He didn’t know what else to say, but of course Aaron knew what he meant. Bee got older but never aged; she was always growing but never changing; she loved so fiercely Andrew sometimes wondered how she could keep on finding the energy to do it. Loved life, loved her patients, loved her home, loved her art. Loved them. Most of all them. “I hung a new painting for her.”

“Another abstract?”

“Thankfully no. She’s moved onto birds.”

Aaron’s mouth twitched. “That’s a relief. I couldn’t bring myself to ask her what the deal was with the one that looks like a vagina.”

“The deal is it looks like a vagina.” It had given Andrew the opportunity to make a pun as he hung the bird one across the hall from it, and the warm music of Bee’s laughter still rang in his ears.

“How would you know?” Aaron quipped. Andrew stiffened automatically, but there was a rare soft humor in Aaron’s face and he let himself relax into the banter that was as natural as breathing.

“Georgia O’Keeffe,” Andrew deadpanned. Aaron nudged him with his shoulder, as he always did, and Andrew closed his eyes. The pounding pressure behind his eyes was increasing, from the clouds they could now see rolling across the horizon or from the overwhelming surge of memories, he wasn’t sure.

* * *

The storm broke, crackling over the landscape and rattling the windows in the cabins. The group of them stood under the tent and watched the storm come in, the cattle hunching their backs up against the wind. The first wave of rain didn’t reach the ground, evaporating into the dry air and leaving behind only the scent of ozone. Close on its heels came the deluge, a swift hard rain that made Andrew grateful they had had the foresight to cover the hillside with tarps, anchoring them with sandbags along the top. When the lightning approached, the strikes leaping closer by the mile, they piled into their cars and retreated to the cabins.

It was not much of a respite. The roof leaked; the windows leaked; the smell of creosote seeped in through the cracks. Andrew sat on his bunk and tried not to flinch as the thunder crashed overhead. Neil and Kevin criticized papers online until Andrew was ready to turn himself over to the lightning just to be rid of them.

By midday, Neil was pacing the small space like a tiger in a zoo. The lightning had passed, but the rain still poured down, running in small rivers over ground too hard to soak it in. Andrew’s headache threatened to make a reappearance watching Neil’s incessant movement as he argued playfully with Kevin. “Enough.”

Kevin glanced up at Andrew. “What?”

“Your mini-me is giving me hypertension. I’m going into town. Coming?” He left the opening hanging in the air for both of them, but his focus was on Neil. Interesting to see naked relief flash in those summer-sky eyes.

“No.” Kevin’s hand sliced the air. “We have work we can be doing.”

“Dr. Wymack said no,” Neil said, frustration suffusing his tone. “No field work until tomorrow.”

“Then we can review the dating. You’re staying here.”

Andrew clicked his tongue before Neil could acquiesce. “My my, Kevin. Controlling much? Didn’t anyone ever tell you that’s not healthy in a relationship?”

Both men looked comically startled. “I’m not—” Kevin stammered.

“We’re not—” Neil said at the same time, looking faintly nauseated.

“I don’t care if you’re fucking or not. Let the man make up his own mind.”

Which was how fifteen minutes later, Andrew was sliding into his car with Neil, Nicky, and Erik in tow. Nicky had leaped at the chance to leave the ranch for a bit, and Erik had agreed with an alacrity that had Andrew looking between them with narrowed eyes. Kevin had refused to come along, and as much as Andrew normally didn’t mind his single-minded intensity he was glad they wouldn’t have to listen to his whining for the next couple of hours. They had left him, pink-cheeked, with Knox and Moreau to talk over whatever minute dinosaur details struck their fancy.

The closest town was small and consisted of a post office, a dry cleaner, and a strip mall made up entirely of chain stores that time forgot. The four of them scurried under the overhang, not even trying to hold onto the dignity that the rain was so effectively washing away. Nicky was whooping and laughing as he splashed through the deepest possible puddle before leaping onto the sidewalk. They all ended up with their hair plastered to their heads, the shoulders of their t-shirts soaked through. Andrew took off his glasses and hunted for a dry spot on his shirt to wipe them off, and was forced to settle for moderately smeared instead of clean.

There were no bookstores in the little mall, but they puttered through a random-crap store and then into the Walmart where Andrew had bought his sheets. This time, he drifted mindlessly around through the home goods section, then past the cheap plastic toys. Neil gravitated towards one shelf; when Andrew followed he found him grinning at the dinosaur toys. “Why is it Jurassic World?” Neil asked. “When like, all of these are Cretaceous dinosaurs?”

“Blame Michael Crichton.”

Neil huffed and poked the Giant Chompin’ T. Rex. “They didn’t even give her feathers.”

Andrew couldn’t help but laugh at the mental image of a giant toothy chicken chasing people across the screen. “I think that would undermine the fear factor they were going for. Lots of people are afraid of reptiles, but nobody’s afraid of birds.”

“Hasn’t anyone ever met a goose? Those things are terrifying.” He ran a finger down the plastic dinosaur’s back. “Anyway, they’re cowards. They should’ve given her a feather mullet.”

“Ah yes, the mullet. The hairstyle of the true monster.”

They found Nicky with Erik near the doors, a strange relief washing over Nicky’s features as he saw them. Andrew raised an eyebrow at him; Nicky didn’t notice or didn’t care to respond. Erik seemed oblivious, smiling blandly at Nicky’s chatter as they left the store.

Nicky dragged them into an outfitter’s store, disappearing into the outerwear section with Erik in tow. Neil trailed after Andrew, who headed to the men’s pants section and began sorting through the racks.

“Were you being serious this morning?” Neil asked, just as Andrew pulled a hanger off the rack, a dark gray pair of high-tech, breathable pants with extra pockets. Nothing attractive about them, but they’d function well in this climate.

“Serious about what?”

“About me and Kevin. Did you really think we were....?” He trailed off, a flush spreading under his sunburned skin.

“What is this, high school? I told you I don’t care.”

Neil was staring at the toes of his worn sneakers. “Kevin’s probably my best friend in the world, I can’t even think about him like that.” He huffed, the corner of his mouth twitching up a little as he looked up through his lashes. Andrew’s heart did something physically impossible in his chest. “I mean, I’ve never really seen the point, anyway.”

“To Kevin? That seems a little bit harsh, he’s useful if you need a reason to annoy the hell out of someone.”

Neil really laughed then. “No, Kevin has his uses. It’s all the rest of it. Just seems messy.”

Andrew stared at him for a beat too long, trying to decipher if he meant physically or emotionally, then gave up and shoved the hanger at him. “You’re buying these.”

“What? No. I don’t need pants.”

“There’s a giant hole in the ass of your other jeans.”

“You checking out my ass?” There was something cheeky in his smile that made Andrew think that for whatever reason, Neil didn’t mind. Even if he was never going to return Andrew’s interest.

“NASA called me, they can see that hole from space. It’s distracting the astronauts.”

“You are ridiculous,” Neil said, his smile breathtaking. It wasn’t fair, that Neil could be this perfect and this completely and utterly unattainable. Not fair, but inevitable. Andrew had never really expected anything else. What he had eked out of this life, it was enough. It had to be.

Neil was at the cashier when Nicky came up, mouth tight, head down; much more like sixteen year old Nicky than his current incarnation. His eyes were darting around, from the clothes on the rack to Andrew’s face to the door. When he got to Andrew’s side he took a deep, shuddering breath and seemed to force himself to reach out, sorting through the women’s shirts that were on the nearby rack. Erik was on his heels, concern in his eyes and voice. “Nicky, what—”

Andrew stepped between them, fists clenched. Erik might have been twice his size but Andrew was well-versed in using being underestimated to his advantage. He knew how to take larger men off their feet, and once they were on the ground it would be a much more fair fight. Erik stopped short, just out of reach. Smart man.

Neil appeared, hovering on the edge and looking between them, face blank, shopping bag swinging from his wrist. Nicky stretched out a placating hand. “Andrew,” he said, quietly enough Andrew had to lean closer to hear. “There’s a security guard. He’s been following me since Walmart.”

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Erik said soothingly. “You haven’t done anything wrong. It’s just a coincidence.”

Nicky shook his head. “No, you don’t get it, this happens all the time. Usually it’s fine, but I forgot my wallet. I—” He swallowed hard, and Andrew followed his line of vision, his anger quickly flipping focus.

The man following Nicky was balding, what hair he had left more gray than brown. He wore a standard rent-a-cop uniform complete with a badge he probably pulled out of a vending machine. He hesitated for a split second when he realized Nicky was surrounded by a wall of White Boy, then straightened, resting one hand on the butt of his gun. “Can I see some identification?” he demanded.

Neil slipped in front of Nicky, who was fumbling through his pockets as if searching for his wallet. “Why?” he asked.

“This doesn’t concern you. It’s his ID I’m looking for,” the guard said, gesturing at Nicky.

“As he’s my colleague, and a fellow human being, it does concern me. Has he done something wrong?” He spoke in broad middle-American, every trace of his English accent gone, and Andrew blinked at him before turning back to the guard.

“I just need to see some ID.”

“Why?”

The man looked over Neil’s shoulder, apparently trying to pretend he wasn’t there. “I’m in charge of security here, I don’t know you, and I’m asking for your ID.”

“I think we all understand that,” Neil said with exaggerated patience, forcing himself back into the asshole’s line of sight. “And I am asking why. Are you accusing him of a crime?”

A muscle flickered in the guard’s cheek. “Not yet.”

“Then you have no right to demand ID.”

“It’s okay, Neil,” Nicky said, his voice strained.

“No, it fucking well is not.” Neil crossed his arms and fixed the guard with the most vicious look Andrew had ever seen on a human face. “He has no legal right to demand ID if you’re not trespassing, which is hard to do in an open store, and he has no reason to single you out. Do you,” Neil looked at the man’s badge, “Craig?”

“He was behaving suspiciously.”

“How so?” The guard didn’t respond and Neil gave what might charitably be called a smile. “By shopping while brown?”

Erik stiffened and stepped up behind Neill, placing himself between Nicky and the guard. Craig glanced up at the towering German with a flicker of nerves. “Look, I’m just trying to do my job here.”

“And does your job involve discrimination?”

The man bristled and glanced around; a couple of other customers were watching, Andrew realized, one with their phone out. “Look, I can have all of you thrown out,” he said, trying to keep his voice down.

“You can,” Neil conceded, raising his voice in response. “That is within your rights, Craig. I’ll be more than happy to call—” he glanced again at the man’s badge “—Associated Security and tell them all about how you used your right to kick a paying customer out because he happened to be shopping with a brown guy. I’m sure that will go over well. You’ll probably get promoted, maybe then you can actually get your last name on your badge.”

Craig swallowed hard and took his hand off of his weapon. “Craig is my last name,” he muttered.

“My apologies,” Neil said. “Now, are you going to back the fuck off and let us get on with our lives?”

Andrew had heard the expression of someone leaving with their tail between their legs, but he had never witnessed a scene that merited its use quite as much as this one did. “Damn, Neil,” Nicky said tremulously, trying hard for a smile. “Remind me not to get on your bad side.”

The storm was finally over, the sun shining brightly as if in twenty minutes the world had forgotten such a thing as rain existed. But though the day was heating up, the puddles evaporating in a warm mist as they walked out to the car, Nicky was shivering at Andrew’s side. As soon as they were back in the car, Erik slid an arm around Nicky and pulled him close.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize, when you said he was making you nervous.”

“I know.” Nicky’s voice was soft, resigned. “I wouldn’t expect you to get it.”

Erik sighed. “I’ve heard of these things happening in America, but I thought it was exaggerated.”

“Are you saying it wouldn’t happen in Germany?” Nicky asked, and there was still an edge to him that made Andrew pause before pulling out of the parking space.

“I’m not saying that, exactly,” Erik said slowly. “Racism is everywhere. But I have never seen something like this happen there, no.”

“Does that mean that it hasn’t happened, or that you haven’t noticed it?” Nicky waved a hand as if trying to shoo his own words away. “Never mind, I’m sorry.”

“No, that’s a good question.” Erik rubbed his free hand over his face. “I’d like to think I would have picked up on that, but I don’t know. Maybe I just never noticed because it was never something I had to worry about, you know?”

Nicky hummed and dropped his head back against the seat. “I’m sorry I had to ruin this for everyone.”

“You didn’t ruin anything.” Andrew’s voice came out harsher than he meant it to, and Nicky straightened up to meet his eyes in the rear view mirror. They stared at each other for a long moment, then Nicky’s mouth twitched into the tiniest beginning of a real smile. Andrew felt his shoulders relax and shifted the car into drive.

They pulled out onto the road in silence, and then Nicky asked, with forced brightness, “Hey, are we not going to talk about Neil’s accent?”

“No,” Neil said firmly, but without the poisonous edge that had laced his voice earlier.

“But—”

“Shut up, Nicky,” Andrew interjected. “That asshole would never have listened to a Brit.” Neil gave an indignant huff but there was the ghost of a smile on his lips that lingered for the rest of the quiet ride home. Nicky spent most of it with his head on Erik’s shoulder, and Andrew caught a glimpse of a certain softness in Erik’s eyes that made him wonder if Nicky would be heading off to Germany once his thesis was done. A wave of reluctant nostalgia hit him. There was a time—in high school, and the first couple years of university—when it had been just him, Nicky, and Aaron against the world.

He didn’t need them anymore. He never had, not really, but that didn’t stop his gut from twisting. It didn’t stop the hollow ache from forming under his sternum. It didn’t stop the recognition that he would always be the one left behind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am beyond excited about the reaction from y'all, the comments are amazing and I really hope you love this chapter! Things are just starting to get a bit real for Andrew here <3


	4. May

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As more of Donald is uncovered, the gang starts to realize they may have something never before seen on their hands, but despite that-or maybe because of it-Andrew finds himself teetering on the edge of a depressive episode.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for depression. Andrew in this AU is being more properly treated for his mental illness, thanks to having been adopted by Bee as a child.
> 
> Glossary:  
Neural spines - also called dorsal spinous processes, they are the spikes on top of vertebrae that back muscles attach to. More pronounced on thoracic and lumbar vertebrae than on necks and tails in most species. Elongated ones are what cause the "withers" on horses and the hump on bison.  
Hypacrosaurus - a hadrosaur (duckbill) genus that lived from 75 to 65 million years ago. It is known for extremely elongated neural spines, leading to a very distinct body shape with a tall back and tail.  
Huehuecanauhtlus - a hadrosaur genus that lived from 85 to about 80 million years ago. It also had tall neural spines, though only about half to two-thirds as tall as Hypacrosaurus. Prounounced WAY-way-can-OUT-luss  
Texacephale - a small herbivorous dinosaur found in 2010 in Texas, believed to have lived from 85 to 70 million years ago. Only known by 2 skulls.

Neil dropped a plate on the table next to Andrew, oblivious to or uncaring of the dust cloud that wafted up around its edges. “Talk to me about locomotion.”

Andrew waved the cloud in Neil’s direction, cursing the return of the English accent. He didn’t want to be distracted by him, not now. Not when he had firmly resolved to ignore him for the rest of the dig, and had done well with that for almost forty hours. Not when he felt poised for a fall, and didn’t know what lay below.

It wasn’t like Andrew didn’t have enough work to keep him occupied. They all did. The sandbags and tarps had largely protected the hillside from the storm, but a chunk of Donald that they had partially excavated had loosened and slid down the hill. A few of the vertebrae it contained had been damaged, and Andrew’s task for the day was applying Vinac to strengthen the bones before encasing them in protective plaster. “You need to work on your dirty talk.”

“Ha, ha,” Neil said around his mouthful of burger with its dust garnish. “No, seriously, what was it you thought was wrong with the simulations?” Andrew shot him a glare and he shrugged without apology. “Kevin said you didn’t agree with them.”

“Why the fuck were you talking about my thesis?”

“You have met Kevin, right?”

“Fair point.” He brushed more Vinac on the spine of the vertebrae, which had crumbled a little with the impromptu trip down the hill. “Did he tell you what my project is?”

Neil chewed and swallowed. “Something about bone modification?”

“Yeah. So, we know bone remodels to compensate for force, right?” Neil nodded, crumpling up his empty plate. “And we have a bunch of hatchling dinosaur fossils from different species.”

“Okay, I think I see where you’re going here.”

“Good.” He went back to silently working to salvage the fossils and counted down from ten in his head.

“Uh, aren’t you going to finish explaining?”

Andrew shoved a brush at Neil, gesturing to one of the other fossils. “You might as well be useful if you’re going to sit there and interrogate me.”

“I hate the way this shit smells,” Neil grumbled, but he took the brush anyway.

“It smells the same whether I’m using it or you are.” He didn’t add the dumbass, but he figured it was implied.

Neil flicked the brush at him, the droplets of the acetone mixture spraying across the table. “You smell,” he muttered, barely loud enough to hear.

“We’re doing physical labor in the desert, Neil. We all smell.”

Neil responded in what may have been French. Somehow Andrew doubted it was flattering. “Anyway, I’ve been working on comparing hatchlings and adults from a few different species, using modern-species models.”

“Wow.” Neil used a dry brush to remove some loose dirt from a crevice, then swiped on some Vinac before dragging his eyes up to Andrew’s. “That’s a huge project.”

Andrew shrugged under the intense blue stare. This was why he was over four years in and nowhere near done. Mostly he was tired of hearing people murmuring about how slow he was, but Neil just seemed contemplative.

“Are you using CT scans of the fossils?”

“When I can get them, yeah.” He had CTs of dozens of leg bones, iguanodonts and hadrosaurs and tyrannosaurs, but it was a smaller sample size than he wanted.

“We might be able to use the program I wrote to help.”

Andrew raised an eyebrow. “What?”

“This is probably why Kevin kept going on and on at me about it.” Excitement was creeping into his voice. “I used CTs of the teeth and jaws to help determine the motion. Jaws remodel too, you know.”

“No shit.”

They finished up in silence, then set the fossils aside to dry while they cleaned up their mess. When Andrew finished rinsing out the brushes, he turned to find Neil staring at the vertebrae, making what looked like measurements with his hands.

Neil looked up when he walked over. “It’s a [Hypacrosaurus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypacrosaurus).”

Andrew blinked at him, then looked down at the fossils. He had noticed the elongated neural spines on the vertebrae, common in hadrosaurs, but hadn’t measured them. Hypacrosaurus was known for having the tallest neural spines among the hadrosaurs; along with the skull shape, the sail that the spines made along the back defined the species. While he watched, Neil measured the body of the vertebrae with his hands, then moved them up the neural spine, keeping them the same width apart. One, two, three, four, five, and a little more.

There was a measuring tape buried somewhere in Wymack’s stuff. Andrew dug around until he found it. The rounded part of the vertebral body, where the spinal cord had passed through, was about fifteen centimeters; the spine that rose above it was a hair over seventy five. “It’s the right measurements.” Neil nodded. “But it’s too old.”

“I know.” Neil’s voice was tinged with excitement; he was practically vibrating at Andrew’s side. “Measure the others.”

Andrew went through the other two. Seventy two and seventy four centimeters. No other hadrosaur species had neural spines this tall. But it didn’t make sense, given the other species they had been finding, both plants and animals. Hypacrosaurus was a late developer among the hadrosaurs; it had no business sitting here in a dig site full of eighty-something-million year old fossils.

“I think it’s something else,” Neil whispered. “Something new.”

Andrew studied the vertebrae again. There was something else about the shape of them that was a little bit off, the arch a little too rounded, the lateral processes too blunt to match up with the bones he had memorized in a visit to the American Natural History Museum last year. He looked at Neil, at the almost fanatical gleam in his eyes, and said, “You’re right.”

Neil punched the air.

* * *

“You’re wrong. It’s probably a [Huehuecanauhtlus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huehuecanauhtlus).”

Andrew gritted his teeth at Kevin’s tone and glanced over at Neil. He looked calm, but there was a stubborn set to his jaw and a fierceness in his eyes that was intriguing. Andrew couldn’t help but wonder when he would snap back at Kevin, and who would win when he did. Neil directed that stare at Kevin from across the giant chunk of fossil-containing stone that had been the day’s bounty. Most of the skeleton had been carved out of the hillside in these huge blocks, many of them at least as tall as Andrew; Wymack had already ordered the transport. “We measured the neural spines, they’re way too long.”

“The loose ones, yes.” Kevin pointed down at the partially visible vertebrae embedded in the rock along with the pelvis and the second femur. “This one is going to be the right length.”

“You don’t know that until it’s free,” Moreau interjected. Everyone looked at him in surprise, and a smile started to spread across Boyd’s face. Moreau usually only argued with Kevin in French. Andrew suspected he was concerned others would judge him if he argued with paleontology’s Golden Boy in a language they could understand; little did he know they’d all just get some popcorn and watch. “And it doesn’t matter if some of them are shorter if the rest are the right size.”

“But even if the spines are too long for a Huehuecanauhtlus, Hypacrosaurus didn’t exist eighty million years ago,” Kevin said.

“Correct,” Wymack answered. “We’re what, eight, ten million years too early, and fifteen hundred miles too far south.”

“So either we’ve got the dating wrong—”

“We don’t,” chorused four different accents with the same level of exasperation.

“ —or you’re wrong about the spines.”

Andrew handed him the measuring tape. Kevin rolled his eyes but took it anyway. “This isn’t going to prove anything.”

He was too exhausted to deal with Kevin’s shit right now; all he wanted was to crawl under his blanket and not come out until morning. The feeling had been nipping at his heels all day like an unwanted dog; he knew ignoring it wouldn’t make it go away, but he didn’t have time for it. “Just measure the damn thing and then tell me it’s a Huehuecanauhtlus.”

“Honestly,” Nicky said, “I think y’all are just trying to prove you can say...way-way-can’t-this.”

Everyone ignored him in favor of watching Kevin measure the visible portion of the sacral vertebrae once, then twice. Something flickered across his face—excitement, immediately suppressed.

“What’s the verdict?” Wymack asked. He sounded casual, but Andrew could read it on his face. He already knew what Neil and Andrew had just figured out.

“It’s not a Huehuecanauhtlus.” Kevin rubbed a filthy hand over the back of his neck, leaving streaks of dirt mixed with sweat. “We may have found something.”

“New,” Neil interjected. “You can say it. We’ve found something new.”

Everyone stared at the fossils in front of them, the stony echo of a life lost so long ago it was unfathomable. “We need a skull,” Kevin muttered.

Kevin wasn’t wrong, as much as Andrew hated to admit it. Neil nodded

“There’s enough here to raise the question,” Wymack said. “We have enough here to publish, once it’s all cleaned up and the dating is confirmed.”

“We need a skull.”

* * *

They found a skull a few days later, but it was to the wrong dinosaur.

Renee had found it; at first Andrew thought it was yet another of Donald’s foot bones that had somehow gotten displaced, but when he got closer it was easy to recognize the rounded shape. Matt was ridiculously excited about the new skull, his little herbivore-loving heart nearly beating out of his chest when he recognized the strange plating on the skull. The rest of the crew had gathered around, offering back-slaps and congratulations, while Andrew withdrew to catch a few minutes quiet against the boom crane that sat idle in the parking area, waiting to lift the freed rock down to safety.

The skull belonged to a [Texacephale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texacephale), only the third specimen ever found and according to Matt and Renee, probably the one in the best condition. More of the skeleton was buried nearby, the small bones surfacing one by one. The pair of them pulled away from the main work of the hadrosaur to salvage the smaller creature before it got destroyed as they tore through the hillside. Meanwhile, the rest of them spent the next few days digging out the rock containing Donald’s front legs from where they had ended up folded underneath the ribcage somehow.

The ribcage itself was now in two enormous blocks of rock at the bottom of the slope, encased in plaster and wood. As nightfall started to creep across the ground, Andrew sat back and looked up at the site, the faint sense of satisfaction at the day’s work disappearing like the sun. He shivered. Just a few weeks ago, it had been a gravel-strewn slope, the top dotted with the rough grasses and cacti that made up the landscape as far as the eye could see. The innocuous had covered over the story of a world so ancient it belonged in fiction. But now, they hadn’t just opened the book; they had torn the cover off and shredded the pages, searching for the foundation of truth within with no care for all the rest.

He didn’t know why he felt so hollow. The others were laughing and joking as they headed in for dinner, full of sunlight and pride. Only Nicky was quieter than usual, but he had been since Klose had flown back to Germany. Andrew couldn’t summon the energy to worry.

His stomach growled, but he didn’t feel hungry. He sat on the rough ground and leaned against one of the boxes of Donald. One hand played with his phone; he pulled up Bee’s contact info, a finger hovering over _Call_, but he didn’t have words tonight.

He could feel it coming, the fall. It had been years since he had plummeted off that particular cliff, but he lived his life driving on the edge of it. His meds were a guard rail; therapy was a guard rail; Bee and Nicky and Renee were too. They usually kept him on the road, but sometimes they weren’t quite enough.

Cautious footsteps sounded down the hillside. It took more energy than it should have to look at the newcomer, but he wasn’t surprised to see the slender form of Neil picking his way across the dirt. There was something in his hands; when he reached Andrew, he held it out silently.

Chili, a spoon resting against the side of the paper bowl. A packet of saltines and a bottle of water. Andrew took the bowl automatically, and Neil sat down on the ground next to him, setting the water in between them. The chili didn’t taste like much, and he didn’t know if that was due to Wymack’s cooking skills or his own tastebuds. He choked it down, and took another spoonful.

“Do you want to talk?” Neil asked softly. “Or be distracted?”

Andrew didn’t answer right away; his mouth was too dry, his tongue too thick to speak. He gulped down some of the water, and shrugged when his voice still wouldn’t come.

“Renee and Matt were talking about the Texacephale,” Neil said, evidently opting for distraction. “I guess they think its skull is shaped like that because they butted heads. You know, like sheep. But they were like, dog-sized.” His mouth twitched up in a whisper of a smile. “I don’t know, I just like really picturing these dog-sized reptiles smashing head-first into each other.”

“You obviously understand that impulse,” Andrew said. The words were slow and sticky; there was a vague sense of relief that speech had not left him altogether. Neil’s laughter sounded a little murky, as if underwater, but he could recognize it for what it was. He took another bite of the chili that still tasted like nothing.

“I guess Katelyn’s professor got the samples prepped and the pollen does confirm our age guesstimate is right.” Neil’s fingers tapped his shins as he thought. “What else. Oh, Kevin is way too excited about the whole, ‘Donald is a new species’ thing, so you might want to avoid him for a bit if you don’t want to get your ear talked off.”

Andrew let Neil’s chatter wash over him as he worked his way through the bowl of chili. It wasn’t enough to keep the cliffs at bay, but it did give him a little something else to hold onto. When he finally finished and looked up, Neil was watching him with too-clever eyes.

“What’s the deal with the accent?” Andrew asked, needing to shove Neil’s focus away.

It worked; Neil hugged his knees to his chest and rested his chin on them. “I grew up in the States. Until I was ten.”

Ten. The year he had met Kevin at science camp; the year before Kayleigh Day had died, leaving Kevin to the care of a father he barely knew. Andrew made a go-on gesture with his hand, and Neil huffed.

“Fine. My mother died in a car crash, and my uncle took me in. He lives in Surrey.”

Uncle, not father. Andrew thought maybe he should be curious about that, but abruptly he was too exhausted to even think. He closed his eyes and let his head drop back against the rough wood of Donald’s box. The sounds of the desert crescendoed around them, and Andrew thought he could feel the earth spinning beneath him. It was dizzying and grounding all in one.

“Come on,” Neil murmured. “I’ll drive you back to the cabin.”

“I’m not getting in that fucking truck.”

Neil laughed, and Andrew heard gravel crunch and clothing rustle as he got to his feet. “I’ll take your car. Kev can drive the truck back with the others.”

Andrew opened his eyes to see Neil holding a hand out in front of his face. “You’re a brave man, letting Kevin get behind the wheel of anything.”

“Yeah, well, why do you think I bought something I don’t mind seeing wrecked?”

Andrew hesitated for a moment before reaching up and taking Neil’s hand, letting himself get pulled to his feet. His hand felt warm after Neil let go; strange, how that lingered, when everything else had gone cold.

* * *

The week passed; the guard rail held. Somehow, Andrew was able to keep just this side of the fall. It was familiar, this trudging survival on the edge of catastrophe. There was a reason Andrew never liked post-apocalyptic movies. The desolation looked too much like the inside of his own brain.

Maybe the work helped; activity was supposed to, after all. He didn’t always know how he did it, but every morning he got up. Renee sat with him while he ate. He dug and sorted and preserved. Kevin came and talked at him, and Nicky and Neil; most of the time the words flowed over him like water. More and more of the Texacephale was uncovered; Andrew found some of Donald’s missing cervical vertebrae. The wonder of it all was gone; the beauty of a memory too ancient to belong to him had crumbled into dust. He thought maybe that was what hurt most of all.

“You know when art collectors went and they took altars and pottery and whatever, like they ransacked churches and gravesites and they brought it all back to some sterile museum? That’s what it’s like,” he told Bee one night.

She hummed, and he heard the clank of a pot against the stove top. There was a part of him that was willing to leap on a plane just to have some of her hot chocolate; ironic, given that he was sitting on a rock still warm from the faded sun as they talked. “I think it’s a bit different than entire peoples having their culture and history looted for white people’s enjoyment, but I think I know what you mean.”

“It’s never going to be complete again, though. This whole ecosystem was there, in that sandstone, and now we’ve destroyed it.”

“Time destroyed it, Andrew. And would have again. If nobody had found that bone, if you guys had never gone to excavate it, what would have happened to it?”

The hillside would have eroded and weathered. The fossils would have been crushed by the feet of animals, been weakened in the sun, been crumbled into dust by the wind and the rain. It all would have been lost, maybe the sole remaining proof of entire species would have been lost, and nobody would have been the wiser. He couldn’t say any of it aloud, but somehow she heard him anyway.

“Sometimes, Andrew, you have to do some damage in order to protect what’s most important.”

He hated when she threw his own words back at him; hated that she remembered an argument from ten years ago. The irritation prickled across his skin; it felt strange and unfamiliar, and part of him longed for the numbness to return.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't thank you all enough for reading, and for all the wonderful comments! It's a lot of fun seeing which bits strike people. HMU [on Tumblr](https://fuzzballsheltiepants.tumblr.com) if you like, or have any questions. (Let me know if I need to expand the glossary too!)


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The crew - well, Andrew - discovers what they're looking for, and a night under the stars ensues.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At last we get the first of the art, from the incredible [@broship-addict!](https://broship-addict.tumblr.com/post/187849548582/my-piece-for-the-aftgbigbang-its-an-upcoming) Let me know if this doesn't embed properly for you. Warning for mild reference to depression and death and mild drinking.

Waking up was painful and slow, a process of days instead of minutes. Andrew had never quite understood why feeling everything so acutely was supposed to be a benefit. The sun was too bright; the smells of dust and sweat and sunscreen flooded his nostrils; the noise of pickaxe against rock was almost too much for nerves scraped raw. He was ready to beg for the grayness to return, but then one stroke of his axe, planned to free the last bit of foot from the hillside, revealed something more. His heart leaped into his throat, adrenaline flooding his veins when he recognized the irregular lump in front of him.

Teeth. Hadrosaur teeth. And a bit of jaw. Which meant…

He glanced around. Kevin was at the bottom of the hill, supervising the packaging of the most recent stone block for transport. Renee was nowhere to be seen, probably up in the tent. Aaron was on the other side of the hill. But Neil, pausing to drink some water up where they had found a few loose oviraptor teeth a few days ago, saw him looking and picked his way over.

“Holy shit.” It was little more than a whisper, but it summed up everything Andrew was feeling. He looked up at Neil, at the fervor burning in his eyes, and just thought, _This._

They started in with their chisels, working with extra caution in case more of the skull lay nearby. A couple more fragments of jaw revealed themselves, and then…

“Fuck. Me.”

Andrew would have taken Neil up on that offer, if it weren’t for what he had just found. It was the underside of a maxilla, the upper jaw and palate, facing the sky. “I can’t believe it,” Neil said, shaking his head. “I can’t fucking believe you found it.”

They should have called for Kevin and Wymack; they should have stood up and yelled at the sky. Instead they crouched there, knee to knee, just staring, fingers tracing along the ridges of exposed teeth, the smooth curve of bone. Most of the skull was embedded in the rock; they wouldn’t know about the nasal crest, or what species this really was, until they got it back to the lab. But the answers were here, under their fingertips, a book ready to be opened. For this moment, it belonged just to the two of them.

It was Knox, of course, who recognized something was up. Andrew looked up at the crunching of feet to see him hovering overhead. “Jesus, Andrew.” He whistled, low and admiring. “You’re a good luck charm, I swear.”

With that, the spell was broken; everyone swarmed in, just as he had known would happen. Kevin was practically vibrating with poorly-suppressed triumph. Andrew backed away as the others began to clear the surface. The bustle of all those bodies was too much, but that was okay. It was his, that skull, his and Neil’s, and the warmth of that knowledge bloomed in his chest.

* * *

The afternoon quickly dropped into dusk. Andrew was exhausted by the time he had eaten and retreated back to the cabin, yet there was a strange restlessness pushing at his bones. He thought the quiet darkness of the cabin would be enough to settle him, but there was still an itch under his skin. None of his books could hold his attention; the shower did not wash the prickly feeling away.

The cabin door opened, and he realized the source of his problem when it entered and looked at him with those too-blue eyes. “You okay?”

Andrew gave him a flat look in answer, and Neil grumbled something under his breath in a language he didn’t recognize. Shedding his hat, boots, and bag, Neil dug around in his suitcase and headed into the bathroom. The shower cut on, and Andrew let his head drop back against the wall. Of course he walked from one problem directly into another, and he wasn’t sure which one was going to prove easier to dismiss.

Neil emerged, and the air in the cabin was harder to breathe. Andrew wondered where the others were, if maybe he should head back to the tent and join in whatever celebration they were having. _Maybe Neil came back to be alone with you._

No. He ordered his brain to shut up. He could not afford to go down that trail; Neil was not interested. He’d made that clear weeks ago.

Even if it seemed like things had shifted since then, their tectonic plates colliding with a feeling of inevitability. It was bullshit, anyway; stories people told themselves to take decisions out of their own hands. There was no such thing as fate, or luck, and it had been a long time since Andrew had let himself believe in magic.

“Come on,” Neil said, scooping his keys up off the desk and twirling them around his finger.

Andrew wanted to say no on principle. He dropped off the bunk and shoved his feet back into his shoes instead. “Where?”

“You’ll see.”

The door groaned as he got into the passenger seat of Neil’s shitty truck and he wondered for a second if it was about to drop off the hinges. Somehow it survived being slammed shut and then they were off, bouncing down the cattle-rutted road. The mottled heads of the offending hamburgers-on-the-hoof raised to stare at them as they passed, the wind that whipped through the open windows bringing with it their earthy smell.

He expected everything to get oppressively dark once they crested the ridge and left the ranch buildings behind, but instead a whole new palette of color opened up before them. He had never seen the sky like this, purples and navies fading to inky black as it reached the zenith, stars scattered across it by the careless hand of some forgotten god. Neil pulled off the road and over a cattle grid before killing the engine.

Minus the headlights the colors got even richer. Neil got out and went around to the truck bed; after a moment Andrew followed. “I didn’t take you for a romantic,” he said dryly, hopping up onto the tailgate to sit next to Neil.

Neil snorted but didn’t take his eyes off the sky. “I didn’t take you for a cynic. Oh wait.”

“What are we doing out here again? Since it looks like my first guess of you luring me out here to murder me isn’t likely to happen.”

“You came along awfully willingly if that’s what you thought my plan was.” Neil lay back on the truck bed, hands loosely folded across his abdomen, feet dangling. Andrew mimicked him, ignoring the thrill that went through him at the enormity of the sky above him, the heat of the man next to him.

“What, like you don’t spend your spare time longing for the sweet release of death?”

“No,” Neil said seriously, dragging his attention away from the stars to meet Andrew’s eyes. “There’s nothing sweet about death. It’s ugly and messy and awful, and then it’s just...nothing.”

“Yeah. That’s the appeal.”

“That’s such bullshit, Andrew—” Before he could go on there was a flash of light across the sky. Neil’s head snapped around to watch it. Andrew felt his breath catch as it disappeared, leaving a streak across his retinas. A meteor. His mind automatically dredged up all the science behind it. A loose hunk of rock floating in space near Earth’s orbit, drawn in by gravitational pull only to burn up in the friction of the atmosphere. Plain science, easy to prove. But another part of him, deep in his chest, thought: _shooting star_.

Another meteor flared, then a moment later, another. “Make a wish,” Neil murmured at his side. His face was open, reverent. Andrew wasn’t sure what was more stunning in that moment, but when he looked back up at the shower of light death was the furthest thing from his wishes.

“Is this the reason you brought me out here?” he asked as the last of the brightness faded.

“Yeah.” Andrew may have imagined it but he thought Neil scooted a little closer. “Didn’t you hear Kevin going on and on about it?”

“What makes you think I listen to more than a quarter of the words that come out of Kevin’s mouth?”

“A quarter?” Neil’s smile was audible. “That’s impressive, I can’t handle more than a tenth.”

“You’re the one who knew about the meteor shower.”

Neil shrugged, his arm brushing Andrew’s lightly enough to send goosebumps racing. The touch seemed to be some sort of trigger; Neil sat up and scooted off the truck bed before Andrew could blink. He rummaged around in the cab for a moment then reappeared at the tailgate, brown bottle in hand.

“I didn’t think you drank,” Andrew said, sitting up and reaching for the bottle.

“I don’t really.” Neil unscrewed the cap and took a swig with a practiced air before handing it over with a shrug. “Nicky asked me to go with him when he went to get some beer and I liked the label.”

The bourbon was sweet and warm and kind of spicy; too mellow to burn, but it left a warm track down Andrew’s throat. He squinted at the label, angling it until the moonlight caught the writing, and huffed a laugh. “Fighting Cock?”

Neil grinned, but shook his head when Andrew offered the bottle. “Seemed appropriate.”

Indeed. Andrew still didn’t know what to do for Nicky, not the way he should. Not that Nicky seemed to hold any expectations, which somehow served to make the angry futility worse. He took another swig to try to chase away the feeling, then screwed the cap on and stretched out on the truck bed again, shoulder to hip with Neil, staring up at the light-studded sky. It reminded him of the first Christmas he’d spent with Bee, when he and Aaron had crawled under the tree and stared up through the branches at the lights. The same mixture of warmth and awe and a little twinge of something that might have been fear.

“Can I try something?” Neil whispered.

The goosebumps went up Andrew’s arms again. He turned to look at Neil looking back at him, teeth worrying his lower lip. “No.”

“Okay.” Neil turned back to the stars, and Andrew clenched his fists, digging his nails into his palms.

“Trying something could mean anything with you,” Andrew said, rolling onto his side. “I don’t know if you want to hold hands or commit armed robbery. You’ll have to be more specific.”

Neil huffed and turned to face him, pillowing his cheek on his hand. The night was far from silent. The cows were rustling on the other side of the fenceline, clearly audible over the background music of omnipresent crickets; somewhere not far off, an owl hooted. Yet silence stretched between them until Andrew could hear his own heartbeat in his ears.

“I wanted to know if I can kiss you,” Neil finally murmured.

“Then you should’ve just said that.”

“Can I kiss you?”

Andrew hoped his swallow wasn’t audible. “Yes.”

Neil shifted closer, raising himself up on one elbow, then hesitating there. Andrew found himself staring at his lips, the play of moonlight and shadow across them. Then Neil closed the distance and pressed his mouth firmly against Andrew’s.

It might have been chaste, if it weren’t for the way he lingered there, or the shaking breath he drew as he pulled away. It might have been chaste, if it hadn’t made every coherent thought leave Andrew’s head.

“That all you’ve got?” Andrew meant it to sound like a challenge, but it came out rougher than he expected.

Neil’s laugh tickled his chin. “You think you can do better?”

Andrew hummed assent. “Where can I touch you?”

“Anywhere,” Neil said, blinking at him in confusion. Andrew raised an eyebrow. “Um, not there.”

“I wasn’t planning on touching your um-not-there.”

“Asshole,” Neil said, the smile back in his voice. Andrew reached up to brush it with his thumb, memorizing the curve of his lips.

The truck creaked as they shifted yet closer, the ridges in the bed digging into Andrew’s hip. But he didn’t mind that, not when he could bury his fingers in Neil’s hair and pull him in. Not when Neil tasted like that, sweet and smoky; not when he made little involuntary noises as Andrew explored his mouth; not when Andrew wasn’t sure if he was melting or about to combust.

Andrew broke away to trail kisses across Neil’s jaw, tasting the salt on his skin. He smelled like the desert, like sunshine and red rocks; Andrew’s arms ached to pull him closer, until they were flush against each other, then closer still. Instead he released him. It felt like letting go of part of himself.

“Okay, yeah,” Neil said softly, a faint tremble in his voice that was echoed in his limbs. “You’re definitely better at that than I am.” He hovered a hand over Andrew’s face, and at Andrew’s nod traced his cheekbone with his thumb. “Can we do that again sometime?”

“Sometime?”

“Like now?”

“Yeah.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ahhhhhhh I can't thank you all enough for the comments and feedback! I hope y'all continue to enjoy as these boys start to, ahem, get to know each other a little bit better. And HMU [on Tumblr](https://fuzzballsheltiepants.tumblr.com) any time for questions, comments, or to make a wish <3


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Andrew and Neil continue to get closer, and Kevin is becoming more concerned for his best friend, and Aaron for his brother. Aaron is not going to let the forced proximity go to waste any longer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is why this fic earned the M rating, so there are sexy times, though not particularly graphic. Warning for some mild and unintentional homophobia from Kevin (or so it's interpreted by Andrew, at least). And check out the incredible art by Val [@cats-are-assholes on Tumblr.](https://cats-are-assholes.tumblr.com/post/187846749374/for-this-aftgbigbang-i-got-to-create-art-for-the) (Please let me know if there's any issues with the embedding!)

The Texacephale skeleton disappeared under a coating of plaster, layer by layer. Andrew leaned against his car and watched as the boom crane lifted the whole thing up and carefully set it down on the wooden planks laid out in a row for this purpose. It looked like an enormous marshmallow, and weighed probably around five thousand pounds.

The scene looked like a giant’s apartment being packed up for a move. The truck Wymack had hired to haul it all across the country was coming in less than a week; they would linger for another day or two cleaning up, and then disappear again, turning the landscape back over to the desert. Idly, he wondered how long it would take before the shattered hillside was scarred over. A year? Maybe two? The rough grasses and cacti would creep down; so would the there-and-gone wildflowers blooming yellow and blue, the daisies that looked so gentle and out of place against the harsh red rock.

Bee would find that beautiful, some sort of symbol of the power of healing or whatever. Maybe it was. It probably was healthier for him to think about it that way, instead of as a mark of the general impermanence of everything. But even eighty million years wasn’t enough to keep this skeleton protected forever. Eventually time won out, and it would win out again.

He watched Neil pause, mark something on his phone, and set back to digging at the spot where some indeterminate bone fragments had been found. The urge to go up and grab him, drag him somewhere private, was almost overwhelming. He tamped it down with the ease of long practice. They had stolen a few minutes, here and there, over the past couple of days; he still didn’t quite understand it, why Neil followed him into the bunkhouse or tugged him out into the darkening desert.

Neil turned and caught him looking, tossing him a flash of a smile like a kiss. It absolutely did not make Andrew’s stomach swoop like he was looking over the edge of a rooftop. He kind of hated this, feeling like a teenager. Worse; this was like being a teenager in a terrible rom-com. After all, even as a teenager nobody had made Andrew’s heart pound like this. Nobody had ever made magic seem possible.

He looked up to see Kevin looking between them. There was something calculating in his expression; Andrew didn’t feel like trying to decipher it in that moment. Grabbing a water out of the cooler, he headed up to where Dan and Allison were reviewing the site map and markers.

The afternoon crawled by, cataloguing and measuring and entering data. Andrew was an irritating mix of exhausted and wired when he finally pressed Neil up against the side of the cab of his truck. Any of the others could come out of the cabins to see them, but he didn’t care. Neil didn’t seem to either, judging by the way his fingers tangled in Andrew’s hair and pulled him ever closer.

It was getting ridiculous. The dig was winding up in a matter of days; Andrew would be back in South Carolina, and Neil in England. If they were smart, they would have pulled away from each other after that night under the shooting stars. If they were smart, they never would have started this in the first place.

“Drive?” Neil gasped out when Andrew shifted his attention from his mouth to his throat. Andrew nipped him gently and stepped back, breaking the hold Neil had on his hair easily.

“Drive.”

He didn’t know where Neil was taking them. They passed the spot where they had watched the stars, and kept bouncing down the rough road. There were no trees to hide in, only small ridges and hollows. Neil found one of the latter and cut the engine.

They ended up back in the bed of the truck. Somewhere Neil had gotten a couple of old blankets to pad the area; they didn’t make much difference, but it didn’t matter. Andrew would’ve kissed Neil at the bottom of the ocean, if that was what was available to him.

A few minutes—or hours—passed, lost in the heat of Neil’s mouth, the taste of his skin; the light brush of Neil’s fingers against his scalp, and the faint burn of stubble against his chin. Andrew only realized how entangled they were when Neil rolled his body slightly away without breaking the kiss. He pulled back to check his face; Neil bit his lip and glanced away, his cheeks flushing pink. Oh. _Oh._

“Do you want me to get you off?” Andrew asked, leaning back in to nibble along the edge of Neil’s jaw.

“I’m not...I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about it.”

“Okay.” Andrew slipped his arm around him and pulled him closer. It was enough just to kiss him senseless. Neil melted into him, wrapping one leg around Andrew’s, his temporary shyness forgotten. Andrew’s hand traced patterns up Neil’s back, and he let himself get lost in the feel and taste and sound of him, let himself ignore the voice in his head whispering, _stupid, stupid._

He didn’t care if this was stupid. He didn’t care that it was doomed, that there were six days left of this and then there would be an ocean between them. In this moment, there was just the two of them, and this moment was infinite.

* * *

The creak of the door woke him. He sat up, blinking himself into awareness. Nicky and Kevin were still sound asleep, judging by the heavy breathing he could hear below him, but Neil’s bunk was empty.

Goosebumps crawled up his bare arms when he stepped out into the night air, and he shivered a little as a breeze hit him. He still hadn’t gotten used to how quickly the temperatures dropped in the desert. Neil wasn’t on the porch; Andrew scanned the darkness and finally saw him, sitting on his truck bed, staring off in the direction of the site. He didn’t turn at the crunch of Andrew’s footsteps on the gravel, but he moved over to one side. Andrew hopped up next to him and waited.

“Sorry I woke you,” Neil said quietly, his accent almost undetectable.

Andrew shrugged, too tired to search for whatever the right response would be. Warmth radiated off of Neil, and he shifted closer to try to leach what he could. The silence stretched between them, and he was considering laying back and falling asleep again when Neil spoke up again.

“I lied, before.” Neil glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. “I have thought about it. I was thinking about it, I just…” He waved a hand, as if he could scatter his words from where they hung on the air.

It took Andrew’s sleep-muddled brain a moment to catch up; when it did, the jolt was better than three cups of coffee. He turned to face him, studying the way his wry smile disappeared into shadow, stark and beautiful in the blue light of the moon. “Yes or no?”

“Now? Here?”

Andrew bit back his smile at the surprise in Neil’s voice. “Why not?”

“It’s the middle of the night, I just woke you up, someone could see us, take your pick.”

Leaning in until his lips were almost brushing Neil’s ear, he whispered, “You just have to be quiet.”

Neil gave a shivering laugh, twisting to meet Andrew’s mouth with his own. “No promises.”

Time seemed as slow and sticky-sweet as honey as he began to explore. He didn’t know how long he took, memorizing the feel of lean muscle, the ridges of old scars. Neil was so vital and rare under his hands, a novel told in the hitches of his breath, the faint tremors of his limbs. It was as glorious as a sunrise, and somehow felt as new as the dawn.

Andrew was no stranger to this; he knew a hundred ways to move his hands to drive another man crazy. But there was something in the way Neil stared up at him; or maybe it was the way his teeth set in his lip, or the sweet salt of his skin; maybe the buck of his hips, or the low moan of Andrew’s name, as fervent as a prayer.

Neil collapsed back onto the truck bed, dropping an arm over his face while he fought to catch his breath. Andrew leaned over him, dragging his lips across Neil’s throat while he surreptitiously wiped his hand off on the blanket. Neil huffed and tugged him up gently for a kiss. “Can I?” he murmured, hovering his hand near Andrew’s waist.

Andrew hesitated, listening to his heartbeat thrumming in his ears. He wanted, he _wanted,_ but somehow it felt like walking into a dark room, not knowing what gods or monsters lay within. He closed his eyes, swallowed. When he opened them again, Neil was watching him, patient and unassuming. “Yes.”

Neil’s fingers were calloused, rough and warm; the contrast between that and the gentleness of his touch reminded Andrew of the sweet burn of bourbon. He could get drunk on this, faster than on liquor; the heat of Neil’s mouth on his drove away all reason. Neil trailed biting kisses down his neck, tightening his grip, and suddenly Andrew realized he was teetering on the edge. For a moment he held back, fighting to commit every exquisite second to memory, but a shift in rhythm took him over, Neil swallowing his panting breaths with a smile Andrew could taste.

Habit nudged at Andrew to get up, disappear. He gave one last kiss, more lingering than he meant it to be, and sat up, tucking himself back in. Neil raised a hand as if to stop him, then let it fall. His expression was indecipherable, and Andrew tore his eyes away as he got up and went back into the bunkhouse. He climbed into bed, expecting to drop back into sleep, but he found himself restlessly shifting, waiting for the door to creak, to meet Neil’s eyes through the darkness of the room. But the door stayed silent and still, and the sky was beginning to gray by the time sleep finally claimed him.

* * *

“Did you sleep with Neil?”

Andrew blinked up at Kevin over his fourth cup of coffee. He’d turned down the brightness on his computer screen but unfortunately he couldn’t do that on the rest of the world. A mute button would be nice also. He took a large bite of his bagel and turned back to the screen.

“What is wrong with you?” Kevin hissed as he pulled out the chair next to him and slammed his laptop shut. The sound grabbed the attention of the others scattered around the tent. Dan and Matt turned back to Moreau after a few seconds, but Renee and Aaron edged a little closer. At least the rest of them were already out in the sun, doing another scan over what was left of the hillside.

They wouldn’t be there to witness Andrew gutting Kevin with his cream cheese knife.

“I know you two were gone last night.” Kevin turned his back to the others, clearly aware he’d drawn more attention than he wanted. “Don’t do this to him.”

“What exactly do you think I did to him?”

“I know your M.O., Andrew.”

“Oh, do tell. I did so want to hear your judgment on my life.” Kevin opened his mouth as if to protest but Andrew bulled on. “You’ve slept with way more people than I have, by the way. Or does that not count because most of them were women?”

“No.” Kevin rubbed a hand over his eyes. “That’s not what I meant. I don’t give a shit about that, you know that. It’s just—it’s not the same with Neil.” Andrew just arched an eyebrow at him, and he sighed. “Can we go somewhere else?”

“You’re the one that came after me. I was just sitting here eating and entering location data. You know, my job.”

Kevin glanced around the tent, taking in Aaron and Renee standing nearby feigning indifference. Shaking his head, he opened Andrew’s laptop. “Good work on the map,” he muttered, and fled.

Andrew watched him leave, then turned back to his computer. Aaron was still hovering, radiating irritated concern. “What.”

Aaron shrugged, coming over to claim Kevin’s vacated chair. “What’s he got a bug up his ass about this morning?”

“Who knows?”

But Aaron didn’t move. Andrew double checked a couple more locations, marked one that needed a rock sample collected, then looked at his brother out of the corner of his eye. “Problem?”

“Not for me.” Andrew huffed, and Aaron grabbed his chair and dragged it around to face him. “Seriously, are you ever going to fucking talk to me?”

“Wasn’t planning on it.”

Aaron muttered something unintelligible and Andrew pivoted back to his laptop, scanning to see if he had missed any locales. There was one, where some ornithosaur teeth had been found; he marked it. It was getting harder to ignore Aaron’s weaponized sighs, so he gave up on finishing his review and got to his feet.

Of course Aaron fucking followed. People were scattered across the site, sifting through what remained of surface gravel, talking, laughing, drinking gatorade. It was no longer the frenzied hive of discovery it had been. It was more like the last week of elementary school, with Wymack as the teacher who had given up on lesson plans and was mostly letting the kids do as they pleased.

Neil was standing halfway down the slope, talking to Jeremy. Kevin hovered nearby, expression serious, whether out of misplaced concern for Neil or nerves for being so close to his crush Andrew wasn’t sure. Jeremy threw his head back and laughed; the sunlight played on Neil’s face as he grinned up at Kevin, who shook his head in response to whatever Neil had said.

Andrew half-slid down the path, passing Wymack, who may or may not have said something to him. He got in his car and twisted the key in the ignition; before he could put it into drive, Aaron opened the passenger door and slid in, clicking his seatbelt into place. Andrew shot him a glare, but it bounced off harmlessly. Gritting his teeth, Andrew turned the car around and tore off down the gravel road.

“Where are we going?” Aaron asked as Andrew turned south, away from town.

“Lot of empty desert down here. Good places to dump a body.”

“Funny.”

They drove in silence between infinite stretches of barbed wire fence. The road shimmered in front of them, and for a split second Andrew remembered the first time he’d seen that. Bee had taken them on their first-ever vacation, to the Grand Canyon, and Aaron had decided if they ever actually hit the shimmering spot they would fall into Wonderland. Of course they never did; it always moved, a little bit further out of reach, until it finally vanished altogether. Andrew had mocked the flight of stupid fancy, but that hadn’t prevented the lurch of disappointment when the portal had disappeared.

A cloud of dust rose up, off to the west. “Pronghorns,” Aaron said. “Pull over.”

“It’s not fucking pronghorns.” But Andrew pulled over anyway. “It’s probably someone’s horses or something.”

Aaron gave him a scathing look. “I know the difference between horses and pronghorns.”

Andrew followed him out of the car, squinting through the heat haze. Aaron was right, the asshole; maybe fifteen or twenty pronghorns were running, their sandy brown and white-splashed coats nearly blending into the landscape. They stood, shoulder to shoulder, and watched the pronghorns disappear over a ridge far in the distance. Andrew wondered what they were running from.

“I’m going to ask Katelyn to marry me,” Aaron said softly after the dust had dissipated, leaving the landscape oddly clear.

Andrew’s stomach twisted unpleasantly, but he kept his expression flat. “I don’t care.”

“You asshole. You fucking asshole.” But Aaron didn’t even sound mad, not really; more resigned. “You should care. Even if you hate her, you should fucking care that I’m going to marry her. I’m your brother, remember? You promised me—”

“We promised each other.”

“And what, you think _I_ broke that promise? Just because I followed a better opportunity?” He scoffed. “I never promised to stay in your shadow, Andrew. I never said I’d give up everything I wanted. But I didn’t abandon you. I moved, yeah, but you’re the one who fucking walked away.”

_Just because he’s moving away doesn’t mean he’s leaving. _Bee’s words from years ago rang in Andrew’s ears. He wanted to protest now, much as he had then; but now, unlike then, he swallowed down the words as hard as stones.

_I gave up Edgar Allen for you._ But he hadn’t, not really. It was the excuse he had given when he had walked away from Moriyama’s enormous lab, from the fanatical gleam in Kevin’s eyes, from the certainty of a prestigious university position once he’d obtained his doctorate. Moriyama had lectured him on wasted talent, but Kevin had stayed silent for once.

When the news broke that Aaron had ended up in Utah, Andrew had received a text from Kevin. One word. _Liar._

They got back in the car and drove, their shared history talking so loudly in Andrew’s head he couldn’t hear the silence. A catalogue of memories flipped through his mind. Aaron, cringing away from the assholes on the playground, or in foster care, who thought the small boys were easy targets. Those bastards always learned quickly under Andrew’s fists that size didn’t matter when pain didn’t either. Then Aaron, verbally eviscerating bullies of a different kind when Andrew’s words wouldn’t come.

The monsters, the kids had called them, once they realized there was no winning a fight with them. If you started with one, the other would finish it. It was like they were two limbs of the same creature, and Aaron had left Andrew with the phantom pains of amputation. That thought had Andrew taking his foot off the gas without thinking, letting the car coast along the road, chasing the shimmers without his input.

He could feel Aaron’s eyes on him now, and he shook himself, easing his foot back on the pedal. “Does Bee know?” he asked, just to break Aaron’s focus.

“Not yet. No one does.”

Andrew glanced at him; the defiance in his tone was clear in his face. It was easy to read. Andrew had already thrown this gift back in his face once, and Aaron was waiting for him to do it again. He grunted. “Better tell her, so she can finish celebrating before I get back and have to deal with her.”

“I’ll call her tonight.”

The car was on fumes when they drifted into what passed as a town out here, a gas station, general store, bar, and post office all within thirty yards of each other. Andrew looked around him as he fueled up. This was true desert, not the strange transition of the ranch that still held onto a memory of the prairie. A bird was walking along the shoulder of the road, looking for all the world like it was heading off to work or something. He thought it might be a roadrunner; it looked like the picture in his Audubon guidebook, and nothing whatsoever like the cartoon.

“Meep meep,” he said at it. It pecked at something it found in the roadside gravel, ignoring his presence altogether. Andrew shrugged and turned back to his car. There was something unsettling about being so wholly unimportant to a knee-high bird.

Aaron emerged from the general store with a couple bottles of water and a handful of Milky Ways. He tossed one of the latter at Andrew; it was cold, and Andrew savored the tiny respite from the heat as he bit into it. “Guy keeps a box of ‘em in the freezer,” Aaron said unnecessarily. “Said it’s one of his most popular sellers.”

They got back into the car. Andrew started the ignition, but didn’t shift out of park. “You were never in my shadow,” he ground out, the words feeling like pumice.

Aaron laughed. “Easy for you to say when you’re the one casting it.”

“That’s such bullshit. Don’t use me as your excuse for leaving.”

“Why not? You used me as your excuse for staying.” Aaron shook his head. “Admit it, you didn’t want to go to Moriyama’s lab and it had nothing to do with me.”

The truth of it burned. He remembered the acid that had risen in his throat, keeping him from sleep for nights on end. There was something too big about it all; something that dwarfed him, pressed in on him. He could have done it, no doubt. He could have been famous, a celebrity paleontologist like Tetsuji, with his two million Twitter followers and his podcast and his interviews on talk shows. Like Kevin’s mother. Like Kevin would be, one day.

He could have done it. But it would have turned him into something he had fought not to be, something hard and cold, diamond-edged.

“You’re right. I didn’t want to go to Edgar Allen. I…” He searched for the right way to say it, to explain the oppressive feel of everything to do with Moriyama and the entire university. “I didn’t want to lose the science in the lights.”

“I know.”

Andrew shifted into drive and peeled out of the gas station, heading back north. Aaron turned on the stereo, hooking it into his phone, ignoring Andrew’s glare when the weird, vaguely dissonant music filled the car.

He knew [this song](https://open.spotify.com/track/1n5Oxo5iQNfxFU9dZxZuPO); of course he did; he hated it. Had hated it since he’d first heard it, and automatically gone to nudge Aaron with his foot only to remember he was two thousand miles away. Had hated it even more when he listened to the lyrics. At night, when he couldn’t sleep, it would ricochet around in his brain, shrapnel tearing into every peaceful thought.

“Do you have to listen to this fucking song?”

Aaron shot him a look but skipped ahead to the next. This one was familiar enough to become background music, and he felt his jaw unclench. He wondered how many times they had done this, driven for the sake of driving, silent but for the words of some random angry singer.

The rustle of a wrapper had him holding his hand out in his brother’s direction. An exasperated sigh preceded the press of a chilled object into his palm. He took a bite, the sweet cool richness flooding his mouth while a second wrapper rattled.

“So you and Josten,” Aaron mumbled around his mouthful of candy bar.

“Don’t start making shit up just to make yourself feel better.”

Aaron huffed. “Do you seriously think we’re that dumb? You’re not exactly subtle.”

Cold twisted in Andrew’s gut; he didn’t think he could blame the Milky Way. “What?”

“Everyone was there for the meteor shower but you two somehow mysteriously disappear at the same time? Yeah, really inconspicuous.” He laughed. “Dumbass. Allison made so much bank, it was disgusting.”

Andrew thought back to that night, to the unfamiliar feeling of wonder that had stolen through him, overwhelmed him. He hated the idea of the others’ invisible eyes on him. On them. It stained it, somehow; or maybe it was that it made it more real, and he had never wanted it to be real. It was better as a dream.

“Is that what Kevin was bitching at you about?” Aaron was gazing out the window, arm resting on the door like he didn’t actually care. He was such a shitty liar.

Andrew kept his eyes on the road and his mouth shut, listening to the stereo murmuring over the hum of the road noise. <del></del> He remembered blasting [this](https://open.spotify.com/track/79e2GU4RLPjAqnijfvsXYr) in his room for weeks on end. It had made Bee nervous, but Aaron had understood. He gritted his teeth at the memory of that easy understanding, and wondered when in the leaps and stutter steps of time it had been lost. For someone who remembered everything, it should’ve been easier to figure out.

“You’re really still doing this, huh?” Aaron’s voice cut through his fogged thoughts, and he realized they were coming up on the turn fast. He braked, a bit harder than he needed to, and Aaron cursed.

“Doing what?”

The song had changed, and he hadn’t noticed. [Another old favorite](https://open.spotify.com/track/0vUYAqp3MIi1cFx8LE85No) he never listened to anymore. But he couldn’t hear it over Aaron’s accusation. “You’ve been out for a decade, Andrew, and you still haven’t introduced any of your boyfriends to me. Or to Bee, which…” He huffed and shook his head.

“I don’t have boyfriends.”

“Uh huh. Boyfriends, hookups, friends-with-benefits, whatever the fuck you want to call them, I don’t care. You’re not celibate, but I know you don’t sleep around either.”

“You don’t know jackshit. And I don’t owe you that, I don’t owe you a fucking thing.”

“Yeah, you keep telling yourself that. I guess you don’t owe Bee anything either?”

Andrew’s whole body went hot, then cold, as his fingers tightened on the steering wheel until his knuckles went white. He stepped on the gas and focused on relaxing his jaw, then his neck, until his breath came easier. Aaron was watching him, a knowing expression on his stupid smug face. “Oh fuck off, you’re not my therapist.”

“I’m trying to be your brother, dickhead.”

Andrew swallowed down the unforgivable words that rose up his throat like bile. They drove the rest of the way in silence, other than the song filling the ever-expanding space between them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Honestly I am living for your comments, they're so funny and sweet and I adore seeing what stands out to you! Thank you so much!! Also I linked to the songs I had in my head when I wrote the fic, but I'm sure you had other songs in mind when you were thinking about what the Twinyards would listen to, and I'm curious to know what those would be if you ever want to share! Either in comments, or as always you can HMU anytime [on Tumblr](https://fuzzballsheltiepants.tumblr.com).


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Time is ticking down to the end of the dig, and Andrew is trying to resign himself to the inevitability of Neil going back to England. Meanwhile, Neil is trying to work though some issues of his own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some reference to Neil's demisexuality, though he doesn't use that word. Nobody will ever be better than Neil at calling Andrew out on his bullshit, and we see a bit of that here. And thank you to @allforthebee for telling me about the existence of dinosaur chicken nuggets, my life will never be the same.

Nobody said anything to them about their abrupt disappearance, nor their just as abrupt return. There wasn’t a lot left to do on-site anyway. Andrew returned to his map review, while Aaron went off to do who-the-fuck-cares. The first round of people were leaving the next morning, Jeremy back to California, Jean to France, Allison and Renee to PSU. Andrew found himself being grateful Neil was staying to the end of the week, then chiding himself for the feeling.

After all, he doubted Neil actually wanted to talk to him, if Kevin’s reaction was any indication.

He was debating driving into town for dinner, just to get away from everybody’s judgment, when he looked up and saw Neil’s eyes on him. They were as sharp as they ever were, but there was none of that knife-like anger Andrew had been expecting. He found himself being reeled in, and he didn’t fight the pull.

“Look what Nicky made Wymack get.” Neil gestured at the trays, and Andrew snorted, picking up a sauropod-shaped chicken nugget.

“The fact that these exist makes me question everything about my life.”

“Right?” Neil added what was probably supposed to be a T. rex, a couple of stegosauruses, and a strange blob that looked like an octopus to his plate.

“What the fuck is that?” Andrew asked, gesturing to the octo-blob.

“It’s an ankylosaur,” Neil said, indignant. Andrew grabbed a pterosaur, and Neil made a derisive noise. “Those aren’t even dinosaurs, why are they included in dinosaur chicken nuggets?”

“You sound like Kevin.”

“Hey!” Kevin glared at him from down the table and held up a pterosaur of his own, already dipped in barbecue sauce. “Even I can recognize that ‘Dinosaur and Flying Reptile Chicken Nuggets’ doesn’t sound appealing.”

The table erupted in laughter. “Yeah, I doubt that one made it past the focus groups,” quipped Jeremy.

“Technically, aren’t all chicken nuggets dinosaur nuggets?” Matt asked, grinning at the groans that went up around the tent.

Andrew picked a spot and tried not to be surprised when Neil sat next to him, close enough their knees brushed. Kevin was watching. Andrew met his stare, trying to read the thoughts behind his appraising expression. Neil looked between them, his face a careful mask, and they ate in silence while the conversation swelled around them.

Wymack gave one of his gruff speeches thanking those who were leaving for their assistance, and Andrew escaped out into the night as soon as he could. The air outside wasn’t cool, but it tasted clean; he gulped it down as though it were water. He didn’t know where he wanted to go. Part of him wanted to get back into his car and drive, drive, until everyone was so far behind him he could pretend to forget; part of him wanted to go back and take Neil by the hand and drag him with him. Maybe not go so far, then; maybe just far enough to be away from prying eyes, just far enough to have the illusion of being alone while he took Neil apart.

The scuff of shoe on gravel had him turning around; a figure was silhouetted against the lights of the tent. He turned back to the desert, watching the shadows of cows moving off in the distance, listening to Neil approach.

“Hey.”

He hated the hesitant note in Neil’s voice; hated that he had caused it. Before he could say something that would no doubt make things worse, Neil went on. “Are you okay? After what we did last night?”

Andrew barked a startled laugh. “What the fuck?”

Neil’s face was flushed, a richer silver in the purple twilight. “I don’t know, I didn’t want you to feel obligated or whatever.”

There was no precedent for this; never in the history of the world had there been someone like Neil, Andrew was certain of it. He didn’t know what to make of it. Neil’s eyes slid closed as Andrew cupped his cheek in his palm, his fingertips finding their way into the softness of his hair. “You’re impossible. You know this, right?”

Neil hummed and leaned into his touch. “What does that say about you?”

“I’ve always been self-destructive.” He leaned in and swallowed Neil’s response. His skin was buzzing when they pulled apart, but Neil didn’t go far, just rested his forehead against Andrew’s. Bee’s voice from some conversation or other a decade ago floated through his mind. _Maybe I want you to try to find a way to be happy._

He didn’t know what happiness was; he never had. Other people talked about it like it was something readily achievable, something you could earn, like money, or summiting a mountain. Really it was more like the portal to Wonderland Aaron had imagined all those years ago: a mirage, always floating ahead, then disappearing when it seemed within reach.

“Are we crazy?” Neil whispered, and Andrew wondered if he could read his mind.

“Maybe.” He found one of Neil’s hands and linked their fingers. “Come on.”

They skirted around the tent, uselessly given that everyone was betting on them anyway, and slipped into Andrew’s car. He drove in the opposite direction as he had that morning, north through town then heading east, opening the car up when they hit the highway. Neil rolled the windows down when Andrew hit eighty, laughing as the wind whipped through, ripping the words out of their mouths. The moon was near full, low in the sky and enormous. Andrew darted around a tractor-trailer and punched the gas.

Neil took his hand and lifted it to his lips as the road unfolded before them, and Andrew let himself wish, for an endless moment, that this was real.

* * *

The lightening of the sky pulled Andrew from his muddled dreams. Neil was still asleep, across the way in his own bunk, the waking sun turning his hair to copper. There was an inexplicable pain in Andrew’s chest, and he pressed his knuckles into his sternum but it didn’t fade.

For a few minutes, he let himself imagine it. Waking up in his bed with Neil up against him; breathing in the scent of him, pressing lips against his neck, teasing fingers through the riot of his hair. Scoffing at himself, he rolled onto his back, studying the knots in the wood of the ceiling and trying to get that image out of his head.

After a few minutes, he gave up and climbed down. The rest of the camp was already stirring, people getting ready to leave and to say goodbye. Jeremy was leaning against Jean with his eyes closed as Jean sipped his coffee. Andrew ignored them as he filled a cup and grabbed a muffin, trying to sort through what the day was going to bring.

It was strange, watching people load up into the van that came to take them to the airport. He wanted to turn away, go back to his laptop, but Neil was at one side and Aaron the other. When the goodbyes were over and door had slid closed behind them, everyone returned to the remains of the hillside. Everyone but Neil.

Andrew stopped a few feet away; Kevin at the base of the ruined slope. When Andrew cocked his head in Neil’s direction, Kevin made a shooing motion with his hand. Andrew took the not particularly subtle hint and turned back to Neil.

He waited, still and silent, at Neil’s shoulder. After a moment, Neil glanced at him with a pathetic attempt at a smile before looking up at the others, laughing and chattering where they scattered about the site. Andrew hesitated, then raised one hand to the back of Neil’s neck and pulled him closer.

The urge to kiss him was almost overwhelming, but Andrew resisted; he just squeezed gently until Neil sighed and melted into him for a split second. When he released him, he found Aaron’s eyes on them. Something flickered in them, something like triumph, and Andrew flipped him off. That earned him the briefest flash of a grin from Aaron and a confused look from Neil.

“Ignore that,” Andrew said, and this time Neil’s smile touched his eyes.

Neil was quiet all day; Andrew wasn’t sure if anyone but him noticed. He suspected not; they all seemed fooled by Neil’s token attempts at normalcy. When night fell, and everyone else had gone back to the bunkhouses, Andrew followed him up the hill and into the empty tent. Neil dropped onto a chair, slumped in a weariness that was too familiar to Andrew but utterly foreign to Neil.

He grabbed a couple bottles of water out of the cooler. Neil opened his, just to play with the cap. “I don’t know what to do with this,” he said after a while.

“Drinking it is the classically accepted option.”

“Fuck off,” Neil said, a whisper of laughter in his voice. “You know what I mean.” He gestured between them. “This.”

Andrew bit back the automatic denial. _There is no this._ He hated lying, even to himself, even when it was as reflexive as breathing. So he swallowed down the lie and kept his eyes on Neil, straining to see him through the darkness.

“It’s never been like this before, you know?” Neil blew out a breath that was half-amused, half-frustrated. “You probably don’t. It’s just...I’ve never been with someone I actually wanted to be with.”

“What?” Andrew’s tone was as level as he could make it, but evidently Neil could hear the suppressed rage behind the word. He pulled away and swiveled to look Andrew in the face.

“No, no,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s not what I meant. Nobody’s ever—no.” He took a sip of his water while he searched for words. “I don’t know why it’s different with you. Like, I tried sleeping with people before, and it was just—it was fine? My uncle kept saying that when I found the right person it would be different.” His laugh was stained with bitterness. “I hate that he might be right.”

A wave of unwanted expectations rose over Andrew’s head, threatening to drag him under. His hands found one of the chisels that someone had abandoned on the table; they welcomed the weight of it, the feel of it spinning in his fingers. He needed to move; to get into his car and drive, to listen to the engine roaring as he coaxed it into more. But he could hear the ghost of Neil’s laughter as the wind whipped through his hair, swirling through the car, and he felt Neil looking at him. There was no demand in his eyes, dimly silver in the darkness. No painful hope. They were just...wistful.

Andrew got to his feet, but they refused to carry him out of the tent. He picked his way around the chairs and detritus that littered the area. The cardboard box lay, dusty and forgotten in one corner, and he opened it. Tucked underneath extra brushes was the bottle of tequila, still mostly full. He grabbed it and twisted off the cap in one motion, needing the burn down his throat. “You’re going back to England.”

“For now.” Neil shrugged and looked away, out into the starlit night. “Wymack made me an offer a few weeks ago, same deal as Kevin’s.”

Associate professor. Work in the lab. And help curate the small museum Wymack had persuaded PSU to build. Like Kevin, Neil could easily get a much more prestigious position, should he want one. Andrew toyed absently with the chisel, tapping it against his thigh while he took another swallow of tequila. “Are you going to take it?” He couldn’t look at Neil, not with his gut churning like that; but as he dug the corner of the blade into the table top, carving out a fine line, his eyes found him anyway.

“I’d like to. I want to work on Donald, you know? I want to be a part of that. I’d like to be able to work with Kevin. And you.” Neil’s face was carefully blank as he stared at nothing. “If you want that.”

He could feel Neil’s eyes on him, even as the earth spun, so fast he was dizzy. Or maybe that was the rush of want that he had never let himself feel. He dug his nails into his palms, needing to force out the truth. “I don’t know how to not walk away.”

Neil’s mouth twitched up in a smile; it might have been the saddest thing Andrew had ever seen. “Aren’t you the one who can’t forgive his brother for doing that?”

“Fuck you,” he snarled as that sweet knife slipped home. The irony hadn’t escaped him, but it sounded different on Neil’s tongue. He thought of Aaron’s words the day before. _I moved, but you’re the one who fucking walked away._

“Seriously?” Neil shook his head and got to his feet. He made it all of three steps before spinning on his heel and coming back. Planting his hands on either side of the chiseled groove in the table, he leaned over, staying just far enough out of Andrew’s space. Andrew wanted to hate him for that tiny bit of courtesy.

“I don’t get it, Andrew. You act like you don’t care about Donald, or any of this. Like this is just some sort of obligation or something, but then you get that...I don’t know, that look in your eyes when you look at the fossils, and it’s so fucking obvious that you’re full of shit. Is this just how you work?”

_Yes._ Andrew didn’t say it, but Neil read it in his face.

“And Aaron, does he fall for your bullshit?”

Neil straightened up, ready to turn away. Andrew almost let him. It would be easier, if Neil despised him. Easier, if he could go home, go back to his routine, to his safe empty apartment and his books and his thesis that would never really be done. But the word slipped out without him meaning for it to. “No.”

“No, what?”

“Aaron doesn’t fall for it.”

Surprise flickered across Neil’s face. “So why?”

Andrew didn’t know what specifically Neil was asking, if it was why he had blamed Aaron for their issues or why he only knew how to walk away. It didn’t really matter, the answer was the same. “It’s easier.”

Neil huffed. Andrew held out the tequila, and after a second Neil grabbed it. He took a tiny sip and grimaced at the bottle as if it had just insulted him. “That’s disgusting.”

“Yeah.”

A strange sense of relief washed over him when Neil came around the table and settled into the seat next to him. The nighttime noises of the desert filtered into the tent, insects and birds and who knew what else. He wondered for a moment what compelled them to call out. If it was sex, or loneliness, or just a need to put some small thing of their own out into the void of starlit darkness above them.

“Do you always take the easiest path?” Neil asked, breaking into his thoughts.

“Not always. But sometimes that’s all I can see.”

Neil hummed. “It won’t always be easy, if I come back. I won’t always be easy.”

Andrew almost laughed; the electricity that had infused the air in the tent crackled and sparked. “No shit.”

He laid his hand on the table, palm up; an invitation. It felt strange to watch Neil reach out and take it; like being back in high school, vulnerable and comforting all at once. Not that he had ever held hands with anyone in high school. Even then that had never been his style. He let his fingers lace themselves between Neil’s, memorizing the feel of the long fingers gripping his, the rough-smooth calluses against his own. When Neil leaned against him, resting his head on his shoulder, Andrew half wanted to laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of it. Evidently in this alternate universe that had formed on a cattle ranch in New Mexico, he was the type of guy who held hands with another guy.

“Come back,” Andrew whispered, not sure if he wanted Neil to hear him or not. “Stay.”

There was a long pause where he thought maybe Neil hadn’t heard him, then Neil twisted his head to press his lips to Andrew’s shoulder. “I will if you will.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am LIVING for everyone's reactions! Thank you so much for all the comments for the last chapter, Kevin really does care about his friends, he just has the tact of a sledgehammer. And there will be more Twinyard bonding later, Aaron is like Neil - very good at calling Andrew out on his bullshit. Hope you all enjoyed this one just as much! HMU [on Tumblr](https://fuzzballsheltiepants.tumblr.com) anytime!


	8. Return to Palmetto

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Andrew is getting back into the groove at PSU: working on uncovering Donald's skeleton during the day, and on his thesis, with a little help from someone across the Atlantic, at night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Check out the ridiculously amazing art by the incredible Val! I still don't know how she took this scene and brought it to such adorable life. She deserves all the love on her blog, [@cats-are-assholes!](https://cats-are-assholes.tumblr.com/tagged/if-you-want-context-go-read-the-fic%21)

**July **

“When is Neil going to send you the damn software?” Kevin knew better than to get too far into Andrew’s space, especially when he was holding a sharp instrument, but Andrew had to admit he had looming down to a science.

Andrew didn’t look up from the wing of the pelvis he was cleaning. Leaning all his weight on the pedal of the dental drill, he yelled, “I can’t hear you!” over the whine of drill bit on rock. A small chunk dislodged and flew past Kevin’s ear. He didn’t even flinch.

Heaving a sigh inaudible over his own racket, Andrew finished with the small section he’d been freeing up and let the drill stop. A few strokes of the brush removed the dust, and he looked through the magnifiers. Small amounts of surface crud remained, but this section was ready for the dental scaler. On to the next, then.

Kevin cleared his throat. Andrew pulled his phone out and hit the first number in his contacts, then speaker. “Your BFF wants to know when you’re sending me the software.”

“Do you ever check your fucking email?” Neil asked conversationally, voice tinny through the crappy speaker. “I only ask because I sent the link two weeks ago. Asshole.”

“Must be in my spam folder.” Never mind that he had been playing around with the program for the past eleven days, with Neil walking him through it from five thousand miles away. Never mind that for the first time in a year he felt like he had dragged his head above water.

“Are you kidding me?” Kevin snapped, and Neil started laughing in Cambridge.

“Yes, Kev, he’s kidding. We’ve been working on it nights and mornings.”

Kevin lit up and Andrew held the drill up between them, stepping on the pedal in an utterly ineffective warning. “Why didn’t you tell me? Is it working? What data are you using? Is—”

“You bastard,” Andrew said, taking Neil off speaker. “Did you have to tell him?”

He could hear Neil’s smile through the phone. “Yeah, now he’ll harass you. Otherwise I was going to get three thousand angry texts before bed.”

“I hate you.” But try as he might he couldn’t put the right level of ire in his voice, and Neil laughed again.

“So you say. Talk tonight?”

“Fuck you. Yes.” He hung up to find Kevin staring at him with a peculiar expression. “What.”

Kevin opened his mouth like he was going to reply, then eyed the drill in Andrew’s hand and closed it again. Smart man.

He stayed quiet until lunch, when he once again took up more than half of the tiny available table space and chewed earnestly in Andrew’s direction. Andrew counted down from a hundred to see when Kevin would break.

At sixty three, Kevin swallowed. “What samples are you testing in the program?”

“I’ll tell you...if you can talk to me for five minutes about something else first.”

Kevin stared at him, nonplussed. “What?”

Andrew set a timer on his phone. “Five minutes of no dinosaurs, and I’ll talk to you about the program.”

“But—” Kevin visibly swallowed his irritation when Andrew made to get up. “Um...read any good books lately?”

“Trying to make me do your work for you, huh?” Andrew scoffed. “This isn’t some speed dating scenario.”

Kevin’s eyes turned hard. “Okay. Here’s a fun fact for you. Did you know that Neil has never dated anyone? Everyone he knows has set him up with someone, but it never takes. I’ve never been able to figure it out.”

“It’s not your mystery to solve,” Andrew said flatly, anger and interest warring and anger winning out. “Try again.”

“Football?” Kevin tried weakly. “The, uh, Panthers?”

“Ohhh, three strikes you’re out,” Andrew said, shaking his head in mock pity as he got to his feet. “Better luck next time.”

He barely made it back to his bench when Wymack came in, looking as disheveled and exhausted as any undergrad, aged up thirty years. Andrew wasn’t sure how he got away with wearing old band t-shirts to lectures, but then again, it was better than his old comparative anatomy prof. He still hadn’t recovered from the inside-out polo shirts and mysterious crotch stains.

Wymack made a beeline for Andrew. “What you got for me?”

“We had to modify it a bit, but so far it’s looking promising.” He could feel Kevin’s eyes boring into his back. “I’m just doing Iguanodon for now, we have the most data.”

Wymack grunted. “I still think that’s plenty for a thesis. Doing more is a bit ambitious.”

Andrew felt his jaw set. He had reams of information—measurements, footprints, CT scans, previous theories both idiotic and logical—on half a dozen species, and he knew how it was going to pan out. He just needed to prove it, and he finally had the tools to do so. When Wymack wandered off towards his office, Kevin cleared his throat to start in on a lecture. Andrew reached for a chisel resting on the edge of his bench. “One word, and this will be embedded in your eye socket.”

Which, shockingly, led to a quiet afternoon. Even Boyd didn’t talk much, which probably meant he was terminally ill or something, but Andrew didn’t have the energy or desire to parse it out. He left before five; or rather, Wymack came and told him if he was going to work on his research project to get his ass out of there and go do it.

There was a certain type of relief that he didn’t care to name when he settled in front of his computer with two cartons of questionable Chinese food and a liter bottle of ginger ale. A couple of taps, and Neil’s face popped up on his phone where it rested against his computer tower. The new routine. He didn’t care to examine how quickly it had become comfortable, how easily he had started to depend on it.

“Work or bullshit?” Neil asked, as he always did.

“Work.”

They set up the remote meeting and dicked around with the data until Neil decided it was ready for a test run. The first try with adult Iguanodon data looked like some sort of horrible grade-school attempt at animation of a horse, awkward and oddly mesmerizing.

“The neck is wrong,” Andrew said. “And the tail.”

“Yeah.” Neil was staring at his screen with exhaustion over every inch of his face. “We didn’t make the tail rigid enough.”

“And the neck curves too much.”

Neil hummed. Neither of them moved to make the adjustments. The strange creature ambled across the screen along an infinite blank landscape. Andrew found himself unable to look away.

“It’s cute, though,” Neil said, after an indeterminable length of time. “I mean, how the fuck did that evolve?”

“It makes no sense,” Andrew agreed. It had long been accepted that Iguanodont babies were bipedal, and the adults quadripedal. The prints supported it; the weird little hoof-things they had on their front toes supported it. But the gait was so fucking weird, it looked more like a person walking on all fours than any real mammal he’d ever studied, the hind limbs overly long and thick compared to the spindly forelimbs.

Neil tried to stifle a yawn and failed spectacularly. Andrew glanced at the clock on the monitor. Almost eight; nearly one a.m. in England. They’d been at this for almost three hours, and even his eyes were burning. “You should go to bed, you’re useless to me like this.”

Neil flipped him off, everything oddly distorted in the strange angle of the phone camera. “I should,” he said, his agreeable tone in contrast to the scarred finger he was shoving in Andrew’s virtual face. “But I can’t stop watching this.” Silence stretched between them, Andrew’s food long-gone and his butt numb from sitting, the sky gone black out his window. He was about to hang up when Neil murmured, “I miss that night.”

He didn’t have to clarify; Andrew knew what he meant. Not the night under the falling stars; that was a dream, a fairy tale. Something that still felt unreal. No. It was the last night, after Nicky had gone, when Neil had crawled into Andrew’s bunk while Kevin pretended to sleep. They hadn’t gotten off, as tempting as that was. Instead Andrew had wrapped Neil up in arms and legs, and they had watched each other in the silver moonlight until Neil’s eyes had drifted closed. Andrew had stayed awake far longer, memorizing freckles and the sharp curve of lips, the fan of lashes across cheeks, the tiny little puffs of air on each exhale. That was what Andrew thought of as he lay in bed each night, that was what he heard. Tiny puffs of air from four thousand miles away.

“Go to sleep, Neil,” he said, echoing himself from all those weeks ago. “I’m still here.”

* * *

**September**

“I dunno,” Neil was saying through the earpiece as Andrew walked into the lab. “I still think they used it for epic thumb wars.”

It had started the night before, when they were trying to figure out whether Iguanodon’s enormous spikes on their first digits on their front limbs impacted their gait. Nobody really knew what the oversized claws were for. Defense seemed the most logical; Andrew’s favorite description was that it was a “stiletto-like weapon for close combat,” despite the fact that most of the things that would eat an Iguanodon would probably kill them before they could ever use the claw.

This had led to a half-hour argument about the real purpose of the spike, and Neil had called Andrew on his way in to continue the debate. “But we don’t have any evidence that they had the flexibility they would need for that. I’m telling you, it was to stab fruit,” Andrew said, ignoring the weird looks he was getting from Boyd and Kevin as he set down his stuff. “Think of all the figs they could have stacked up on that thing.”

“So, what, you think they wandered around with their thumbs full of figs?”

“It could explain why it was always sticking up, so they wouldn’t fall off.”

“But what then? Like, okay, I’ve got my thumbs full of figs but I’m also an enormous reptile, what do I do?”

“You saw the animation, they could reach it with their mouths.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Boyd interjected, staring. Andrew almost started, then scanned back through what he had just said and bit back a laugh.

“I’m putting you on speaker, these assholes want to know what we’re talking about.”

“You need to settle an argument,” Neil said, sounding very British and scholarly. “Iguanodonts. Those big thumb claws, used for thumb wars or fruit toothpicks?”

“Oh my god, that’s what you were talking about?”

“What else would it have been?” Neil sounded so lost that Andrew did actually laugh.

“You know what, never mind,” Boyd said. “I always thought they were self-defense?”

Kevin shook his head. “Courtship displays,” he said seriously. “Hadrosaurs had head crests, Iguanodonts had giant-ass thumbs. Imagine this: the herd gathering around, watching the two males with the biggest most colorful thumbs battle it out.” He shrugged. “Neil’s right, it was thumb wars.”

“Fuck you,” Andrew said over Neil’s triumphant yell. “You’re supposed to be on my side.”

Kevin just grinned, a rare expression. “Says who?”

Andrew’s response was lost when Neil said through the speaker, “I’m doing the most obnoxious victory dance right now, you should see it.”

“Video or it didn’t happen,” Andrew shot back, and Boyd laughed, looking between him and his phone with amazement.

“You two always like this?”

“What the fuck are all my best scientists doing shit-talking a phone?” Wymack sounded fierce, but when Andrew looked up there was humor in his dark brown eyes. “Hi, Neil.”

“Hello, Doctor Wymack.”

“When are you getting your ass over here?”

“Not sure, still haven’t gotten my thesis approval.”

“Well, get those assholes off their cans and tell them I need you here to help with this mess. We’re up to our ears in rock dust.”

“You know, I think it’d really help if you called Dr. Adams directly and said just that. I’m sure he’d be thrilled.”

Wymack snorted; he and Adams were the sort of professional frenemies that were common in the field, sharing data but feuding vociferously over the interpretation in hotel restrooms. Adams had pushed Neil to join Wymack in the field, then had punished him with increasing his workload on his return.

“Go back to work, all of you. You too, Neil.”

“Yes, sir,” Neil said, and Wymack grimaced. “You still saving the skull for me?”

Andrew looked at the huge block of plastered rock sitting untouched on its bench; Kevin and Wymack both followed his gaze. It had been Neil’s request, in order to formally commit to coming.

“Yeah, kid. But you better get here quick, I can only hold off these ravening wolves for so long.”

“Talk to Dr. Adams, and I’ll be there next week.”

With that they signed off. Andrew and Kevin headed to their benches; Andrew’s newest project was the hind foot, a picky, fiddly, easily damaged set of smaller bones that haunted his dreams at night. He had just finished setting out his tools when his phone buzzed. It was a video from Neil, dancing what was without a doubt the most appallingly terrible victory dance of all time. For someone so lithe and athletic, he really did look like a stork on meth, and there was no controlling the laugh that burst out of Andrew’s throat. Kevin looked up questioningly, and Andrew held up his phone.

Kevin watched the video, shaking his head for the whole twelve seconds. “He’s an embarrassment,” he said, with real affection in his voice. “Did he ever tell you about science camp?”

“He said he met you there.”

“Yeah. We used to be able to play music for an hour every evening, and everyone would dance around, right? Just blowing off steam, horsing around, whatever. And I mean, this is _science_ camp. This is a few dozen geeky fifth and sixth graders, none of us were sitting at the cool table at school. But Neil was just so bad. So bad.” Kevin shook his head and gave a quiet, private laugh. “He ended up getting a trophy at the end. Worst dancer of the year.”

Andrew hit play on the video again and felt the smile overtake him. It was somehow worse this time through, and he was pretty sure he would be playing it back on an endless loop for days. “Seriously, why the fuck am I doing this.”

Kevin watched as Neil almost hit himself in the face with his flailing arm for the third time. “Because it’s Neil. You’d have to be an idiot to walk away.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you all enjoy this continuation of Andrew and Neil developing their relationship long-distance. I know tradition is to have the story end with them getting together, but I've always been intrigued by the "what happens after?" question. Anyway, your comments are so amazing and I really love and appreciate them, seeing which scenes and lines hit you the most is incredibly rewarding! HMU [on Tumblr](https://fuzzballsheltiepants.tumblr.com) if you ever want to!


	9. Thanksgiving

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Andrew spends Thanksgiving with his family, and Aaron actually might have a little wisdom to offer.

There was an unfamiliar car in Bee’s driveway when Andrew pulled in. Nissan Altima, gray, generic. It took him a minute to realize it was a rental. Of course Aaron didn’t drive all the way from Utah.

The playlist Aaron had sent him a couple of weeks ago was still up on his Spotify. He hadn’t quite decided if he was annoyed or impressed that Aaron had titled it: “wtf happened to your musical taste.” It was full of strange lyrics and gentle music, alternating with the harsher sounds that harkened back to high school afternoons spent in their rooms with the lights off and weekend drives with no destination.

He walked into tightly-reined chaos, voices floating on the aroma of roasting turkey, laughter and knives and glasses of wine. The kitchen was crammed with people and food, and he deposited his offering of more wine and whisky into the dining room before wading into the fray. Bee was stirring gravy while Aaron poked at what looked like green beans on the stove. Katelyn had the mixer in one hand and a bowl mounded with potatoes in the other, while Nicky tried to sneak a taste of the turkey where it sat under its foil tent. Andrew hip-checked him on the way by, and a chorus of “Happy Thanksgiving” filled the space.

It wasn’t long before dishes were being carted into the dining room in a poorly-choreographed dance that nearly resulted in a sweet-potatoes-and-stuffing disaster. The meal went by in a flurry of forks and laughter, of Nicky yammering about his impending move to Germany, of Katelyn showing off her ring that Andrew recognized as having belonged to Bee’s mother. Something twinged at that, and he didn’t know why. It wasn’t like he would ever need it.

Eventually it all slowed down in a tryptophan haze. Andrew watched his family, half-finished whisky in his hand. It was strange having everyone back again. It felt like a decade had passed; it felt like yesterday. But Aaron was settled, steady in a way that seemed to belong to a different universe, and Nicky was making plans that for once had a foundation of reality, and there was a subtle sort of loneliness in Bee’s eyes that Andrew had never seen before.

When the pie plates were scraped clean and the dishwasher humming, Andrew took the dregs of his drink and went out to the porch. He bypassed the swing and sat on the edge, his heels resting in the grass gone pale from frost. There was a text from Neil in his notifications. _Happy Thanksgiving and I saw the new simulation, looks great_

He set his phone down next to him and leaned back on his palms. There was still too much light from the setting sun to see the stars, no matter that the moon was already clearly visible, a reverse shadow of a crescent dangling above the treeline. A crisp breeze smelling of woodsmoke and frost made him shiver, and he found himself longing for earth that retained the sun’s heat and a truck held together more by rust than anything else.

The door creaked open, and his jacket landed half on one knee, half on the porch. Aaron dropped next to him as he pulled it on, and they sat in silence for a while. “Neil couldn’t come?” Aaron asked, breaking into the swirl of Andrew’s thoughts.

He could feel Aaron’s eyes on him, but he kept his own focused on the pathetic excuse for a moon. “Didn’t ask him.”

Aaron snorted and shook his head. “I can’t tell if you’re a dumbass or a coward.”

Andrew gritted his teeth but didn’t reply; Aaron went on regardless. “Did he break up with you?”

“It’s not...like that.”

“Bullshit.” Aaron stared at him for a moment, then nudged his knee with his own. “That’s such utter bullshit, Andrew. We’re twenty eight and you still expect me to go along with this? I was there, you know. You’ve never been like that with anyone.”

“It’s my fucking life, Aaron, I don’t need you to tell me what is and isn’t true.”

“Then tell me. It’s not the fucking Pentagon, Andrew, there’s no, like, statute of secrecy or whatever. Explain it to me.”

The neighbor’s hound started baying somewhere behind the fence. A couple of stars twinkled into being. Andrew debated going inside, but he wasn’t going to withdraw. Not anymore. “You remember the meteor shower?” He waited for Aaron’s hum of assent. “It feels like magic when it’s happening, right? It’s so...bright and beautiful. But how much of that is because it’s transient? We don’t go around trying to put the stars back in the sky, but I wonder if that’s what I’m doing.”

Aaron was quiet for a long time. “I don’t think I told you I broke up with Katelyn once, did I?” Andrew shook his head. “I think we’d been dating maybe six months. I mean, I fell for her like, the minute I saw her when I moved out to Utah. She was in the lab, looking through the microscope, and she looked up and said, ‘Hi.’ And I was just done for.

“But I thought—I don’t know what I thought. Maybe it was the same as you, like she was too good to be true. Maybe I was scared I’d get bored or something, I don’t know. I was an idiot, so I broke up with her. And then she just went on being Katelyn. I saw her every day in lab, and every day she was just as amazing as the day I’d met her, and after like a week I went and told her I’d made a terrible mistake and begged her to give me another chance.”

“I can’t believe she was stupid enough to actually take you back. I had a higher opinion of her intelligence.”

“Yeah, yeah, fuck you.”

Andrew huffed a laugh. “Are you planning on getting to the point of this story sometime in our lifetime?”

“Jesus, if you’d give me a chance here.” Aaron leaned back and pointed up at the sky, where more stars had broken out across the purply black. Andrew could see Orion’s belt; it was the only constellation he really knew. “I know we see it every day, but isn’t it beautiful too?” He nudged Andrew with his shoulder. “So let the stars fall. It might not always take your breath away, but so what? What’s left is still pretty incredible.”

The door creaked open while Andrew was still mulling that over. It was Bee, with three mugs on a tray. “Is this meeting for boys only, or can I join in?”

It had been her standard question when the two of them were talking since the day she’d taken them home. At first, Andrew had bristled at it, always resentful of sarcasm unless it was coming out of his own mouth. But now he knew what it was: her way of acknowledging that no matter what, they had always belonged to each other first.

Aaron reached a hand up blindly, and Bee placed a mug in it. “I think we’re done with the meeting.”

Andrew nodded and accepted his own mug. Hot chocolate, mounded with whipped cream. “Anything I should know about?” she asked, settling onto the swing with the last mug cupped in her hands.

“We were just reviewing all the ways in which Andrew’s an idiot, so, nothing new.”

“And Aaron’s evidently been reading cheezy self-help books on the side.”

Bee laughed, and the sadness Andrew had seen earlier was nowhere to be found. He wondered if he had maybe imagined it.

He checked the time on his phone. It was after seven; after midnight for Neil. While Aaron and Bee talked about something to do with whatever wedding plans were going to be, Andrew tapped out a message. _You up?_

The response came back too quickly. _Unfortunately_

_Want me to call?_

Three dots appeared, disappeared, reappeared. _Aren’t you with your family?_

Andrew got to his feet and scooped his hot chocolate off the porch. “I’ll be back in a bit.”

It felt strange, calling Neil from the bedroom he had first started fantasizing in. He felt like he was in high school again, that fictional High-School-Andrew who held hands with boys and kissed them without shame. “What’s wrong?” he asked, when Neil picked up.

“I’m fine.” Andrew made a disparaging noise and Neil laughed. “No, honestly. It’s just, I got a date for my thesis defense.”

“When?”

“February fourteenth, if you’ll believe it.”

It was Andrew’s turn to laugh. “I can’t tell if that will help you or hurt you, to be honest.”

“Right? I mean, it’s not like I give a shit about the stupid holiday but I have no idea how the auditors will feel.”

“Wait, you don’t like Valentine’s Day?” Andrew asked, feigning shock.

“Does any self-respecting adult?” He sounded legitimately confused, and Andrew bit back on his smile.

“Let me just make a quick note. Cancel...singing...telegram…”

Neil snort-laughed. “Is that a thing? I always thought it was just a stupid thing in a movie.”

“Yes, Neil, it’s both a thing and a stupid thing in a movie. At least here in the U.S.”

“You’re kidding. How did I not know this?”

“I don’t know,” Andrew said, with a shrug Neil would never see. “I consider it a failure of the British educational system.”

“You really wanna get me started on the failings of the American school system? You really think we should go there?”

“Now, now, I may know nothing about history, geography, basic human biology, art, or how to speak good, but at least I know how to square dance.”

This time Neil’s laugh ended in a yawn, and Andrew itched to wrap him up in a blanket and force him into bed. “Go to sleep, Neil,” he said for the hundredth time. “I’m still here.”

He could hear the rustling of blankets through the phone, then another enormous yawn. “G’Night, Andrew. Did you get the rest of the human data?”

“If you mention data one more time...Just go the fuck to sleep.” There wasn’t an answer beyond the deepening of breathing. He listened for a minute, then hung up and headed downstairs to the warm voices waiting for him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> gaaaaahhhhh we're almost done here! Only one more chapter to go, and I hope you all have enjoyed this ride as much as I have. Certainly your comments have been the best positive reinforcement I could have asked for! Thank you so much, and I'll see y'all Tuesday with the end!


	10. February

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Neil defends his thesis, but has an offer to remain in Cambridge; Andrew and Kevin aren't sure if he means to take it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This has been quite a journey! I started writing this back in March, right after I finished the Reverse Big Bang, and it has been fun and rewarding and frustrating and all of the things I love about writing. I am so incredibly grateful to Val @cats-are-assholes and Meghan @broship-addict for their art and how perfectly they captured my words; to Nicole @tntwme for being my intrepid beta and Cory @foxsoulcourt for the constant support; to Niko @nikothespoonklepto (for lots of things) and Bela @belabellissima for all their hard work on keeping us in line after taking this monster project over; to ly @adverbialstarlight for the sensitivity read and support; and to the BB Discord in general for being fun, supportive, and amusing. Dinosaur thumb wars would not have happened were it not for them! 
> 
> And most of all, I want to thank those of you who have taken the time to read this! I've said this before, but it merits saying again: I write for myself, but I post because of all of you. I am a bit overwhelmed by the response this has gotten, and those of you who have been commenting as I post: I see you, I recognize your usernames and icons, and I get so excited to see what you think about each little twist and turn. Thank you, for making all of this hard work worth it.

Andrew checked his phone for the dozenth time, ignoring Kevin’s suspicious looks. Any minute now. He peered through the microscope and picked a few more tiny specs off the distal phalanx. It was the last damn foot, and he would be lying if he didn’t say he’d be glad to move onto something else. The skull still sat untouched in its block of plaster, waiting, waiting.

Any minute now.

His phone buzzed, and he answered and hit speaker in one motion. “What the actual hell?” came Neil’s voice, bubbling with laughter. In the background, he could hear it; indistinct words sung in a strong Cockney accent. “Did...did he just rhyme ‘thesis’ with ‘metaphysis’?”

“Just wait,” Andrew said. Neil must have moved closer, because the song got clearer. Kevin and Boyd had abandoned their benches to crowd around Andrew’s phone, so they all listened through the “defense/immense” rhyme. Andrew started laughing even before the singer got to, “Now once you’ve finished defending your thesis/you’ll have no more need for coffee diuresis.” No one could even hear the end of the song, they were too busy nearly falling down, and Neil sounded like he was almost crying on the other end of the line.

There was a thud, like the phone had been dropped, and some murmuring Andrew couldn’t quite decipher. He took the phone off speaker when Neil picked it back up. “Seriously, what the hell possessed you to do that?” Neil’s voice was hoarse, and Andrew wondered for a brief moment if he had made the wrong decision.

“Remember Thanksgiving?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t think you’d actually do it! How the hell did you find one that did a thesis defense song?”

There was no way Andrew was admitting he’d written the damn thing, not in front of Kevin and Boyd. “I just called the closest one to you.”

“And he brought strawberries too.” There was a little pause. “They’re really good,” he mumbled, presumably around a mouthful of berry. “Thank you.”

Andrew felt his neck heat as he sat back at his bench. He didn’t really know what to say; part of him was tempted to just hang up. “You ready for your presentation?”

Neil sighed. “I think so. I mean, there’s about a sixty-two percent chance I’m going to get in there and either freeze or accidentally insult someone.”

“Right. Accidentally. Sure, maybe they’ll buy that.”

There was a huff an ocean away; Andrew could hear the smile in it. “Most of them don’t know me, I’ll just have to be subtle.” A brief silence, then, “Are you really okay with this?”

“With you insulting your thesis panel? I mean, it’s a bold move but someone’s gotta do it.”

“Don’t be a wanker, you know what I mean.”

“Ooh, going full Brit I see.” Another silence weighted down the miles between them. “Yes, I really am okay with it.”

“I mean—”

“Neil. We’ve covered this.” Boyd was theoretically working on cleaning part of the Texacephale, but his head was angled more towards Andrew than the fossil. Kevin was not even pretending not to be eavesdropping, creeping closer and closer until Andrew held out a warning hand. He pushed past Kevin and through the doors into the hallway, then out into the cold air. “Are you backing out?”

“No,” Neil said, more firmly than Andrew expected. “I’m in as long as you are.”

Andrew could hear it, under the words; the same fear that had been pulling him from sleep the past few nights. A breeze swirled in the little overhang, and he shivered. There was a chance of flurries before nightfall, and he let himself picture Neil in the snow, tiny crystals settling on his hair, melting in his eyelashes. “Go make some old men cry.”

That laugh was going to be the end of Andrew.

He stayed outside until he was shivering, watching the pearly sky and remembering the stars rendered invisible in the daylight. Kevin studied him when he finally returned, but Andrew dropped into his seat without a word and he didn’t push. An hour crawled by, then another; by the time Boyd was sitting down to lunch both Kevin and Andrew were spending more time staring at the clock on the wall than at their fossils.

“It’s okay,” Kevin said, for the seventh time. “Mine took like two and a half hours, and it was nowhere near as experimental as Neil’s.”

Andrew’s fingers flexed, and he indulged himself in imaging them wrapped around Kevin’s throat for a second before forcing himself to relax and turn back to the phalanx. Just as he finished it and set the next one under his scope, his phone and Kevin’s binged in quick succession. He heard something metallic hit the ground behind him and Kevin’s curse as they both snatched up their phones. A picture: the official signed paperwork, held by an exhausted, triumphant Neil.

Kevin’s whoop had Wymack poking his head out of his office. “The fuck going on out here?”

“Say hello to Doctor Neil Josten,” Kevin said, waving his phone through the air.

“Yeah, well, don’t break anything.” Wymack sounded gruff, but his expression was pleased. “Maybe now we can finally get down to describing an actual species.”

Andrew ignored them as he tapped out _how many people did you break?_

**Neil: ** _ None, surprisingly_

_Sounds fake but ok_

**Neil:** _ Adams tried again_

Andrew’s jaw clenched as he glared at his phone. The asshole had decided he wasn’t okay with Neil leaving after all, and had been making increasingly more ridiculous offers to get him to stay on. _I’m starting on the skull next week whether you’re here or not_

**Neil:** _ Asshole. I’ll be there_

* * *

_“You have reached the voice mailbox of—”_

Andrew cursed under his breath and hit End. He was about ready to fling his damn phone through the window into the lab. Or his fist. Neil’s phone had been going straight to voicemail since Andrew had left the lab two nights ago, his texts gone unanswered.

“Hey.” It was Kevin’s voice, and Andrew’s hand tightened spasmodically until the edges of the phone were digging in. He glared over his shoulder as Kevin approached. “What’s going on with Neil? He’s not answering any of my texts.”

There was a layer of accusation under his words, and Andrew’s phone was a heartbeat away from going through Kevin’s face instead of the window. He wrenched the lab door open with unnecessary force instead. Kevin caught the door on the rebound and followed him into the lab. “Not answering you either, huh?”

“Six points to Day.”

If he hadn’t been so aggravated he would have laughed at Kevin’s nettled expression. “Why six?”

“That is the assigned value for that question.”

Kevin dropped his bag at his bench but didn’t take his seat. “You—you assign value points to questions?”

“Of course,” Andrew said, as if it was obvious. He wanted to record the series of expressions that rippled across Kevin’s face—the five stages of competitiveness: denial, grief, anger, hope, and arrogance—but there was no fucking point if Neil wasn’t around to receive it.

“What’s my total?”

“With those six?” Andrew pretended to be calculating in his head. “Negative two hundred and thirty three.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Kevin said, shaking his head as he settled into his seat.

He spent the rest of the morning muttering under his breath. Even Boyd noticed; when he asked him what was bothering him, Kevin answered with a snarled, “Nothing,” while glaring at Andrew like he’d kicked a puppy. Andrew ended up sending Neil a text he’d probably never get.

_I broke your bff_

The day dragged on. Donald’s foot bones, carefully numbered, were tucked away in separate boxes to be sent for CT scanning and casting. There was an ongoing debate about whether they would mount the actual bones in the new museum or use the casts. Andrew had kept himself out of it. He understood Kevin’s reason for recommending the casts, to help keep the original fossils safe from accidents during assembly; rationally, he agreed with Wymack’s thoughts that for a new museum, the actual bones being displayed may be more of a draw.

But viscerally? He wanted to keep Donald’s real bones private, a secret just for those who had been out there. Those who had earned it.

He clicked on the lights in his apartment. So many times, he had pictured Neil here, lounging on the couch with his feet tangled with Andrew’s. Or more likely pacing the space, laptop in hand, reading journals aloud and excoriating the authors. It was weird, considering sharing his space again, sharing his bed for the first time. Weird how much he had let himself look forward to it.

His computer held no answers as to Neil’s disappearance. Part of him had been hoping, he realized, that there would be messages waiting for him. But he sat at his desk anyway, eating his microwaved leftovers and entering data, waiting for the buzz of a new text that never came.

Leaning back in his chair, he rubbed his burning eyes. He didn’t even want to look at the clock on his computer; the exhausted pull at his limbs told him he should’ve gone to bed hours ago. He meant to get up and drag himself to bed, but instead the cursor on his screen found the first simulation, the not-quite-an-Iguanodon thing. The newer simulations were no doubt more accurate, but this was his favorite, and he watched it amble across the screen until he literally couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer.

Kevin looked almost as haggard as Andrew’s reflection the next morning. “Do you have his uncle’s contact info?” he asked as soon as Andrew stepped into lab.

Andrew shook his head mutely. He knew his name—Stuart Hatford—and a rough idea of where he lived, but that was all. It wouldn’t be hard to Google him, but something had stopped Andrew every time he started to type his name in.

Maybe it was the knowledge that Adams was going out of his way to keep Neil in England. Maybe it was how long those three dots had remained up before that last text had come through. _I’ll be there._ Every moment of hesitation, every too-long pause played out over and over in Andrew’s mind.

He sat down to the roughly-prepped radius and ulna that was taking up most of his bench, his tools arranging themselves almost without conscious input. Forcing his jaw to relax, he got to work, only letting himself focus on the delicate interface of fossil and sandstone and the careful strokes of his tools.

Movement around him had him turning off the dental drill. His neck and shoulders were stiff as he looked around to see Kevin and Boyd grabbing their lunches, and he cocked his head until his neck released with a satisfying crack. He pulled his water out and downed about half of it, debating if he should join the others or work a bit longer.

It struck him that Wymack wasn’t in yet; strange. He had an eight a.m. lecture but usually came to lab straight after and bothered everyone for a while before disappearing into his office. Andrew shrugged at his own thoughts and stood up to really stretch, almost wobbling as blood left his head in a rush, eager to get past his ass to his numb legs.

He was still blinking away the spots in front of his eyes when the door opened. Then he blinked a few more times because he wasn’t certain he believed what he saw. Neil, hollow-cheeked, gray smudges below his eyes, listing to one side under the weight of the duffel slung over his shoulder.

“What the fuck?” Kevin’s voice spurred Andrew into action, but his tingling feet couldn’t quite find the floor. He managed to only stumble three or four times, ricocheting off Boyd’s bench on his way to the door. Even still, he got to Neil first.

“Hi,” Neil breathed.

“You look like shit,” Andrew answered. He wanted to grip the back of his neck and pull him close, just to feel the heat of his skin, but everyone was watching.

Neil’s lips twitched up. “Likewise.”

Andrew reached for the strap of Neil’s duffel; Neil gripped it tighter. “I’m fine.” He smiled in the face of Andrew’s best flat look. “Just been a long couple of days.”

“Did you lose your phone?” Kevin asked from somewhere over Andrew’s shoulder.

“No?” Neil reached into the pocket on his bag and pulled it out, hitting the home button and frowning. “I guess it’s dead.”

“No shit.” Kevin appeared in Andrew’s peripheral vision, face as tight as his voice. “We’ve been trying to get ahold of you for two days.”

“Why? I told you I was coming. I was just busy, I had to get everything packed and sent over.”

Andrew thought his teeth might crack; Kevin pinched the bridge of his nose and breathed deeply while Neil looked between them in confusion. He was saved by the appearance of Wymack, gruff and reeking of the cigarettes he always said he was quitting. “What are you all standing around for? I didn’t bring Josten here for social hour. Give him a tour and then take him home to sleep, best I can tell he’s been awake for the last three days.”

“I don’t need to sleep,” Neil said, even as he swayed again. Andrew debated just picking him up and carrying him out to his car, but he didn’t want to deal with Kevin’s bullshit.

“Right.” Wymack looked him up and down. “You think I want it on my conscience if you pass out, hit your head, and end up with a concussion on your first day?”

Neil didn’t argue, though Andrew could see the impatience in the corners of his mouth. Andrew showed him through the lab on a circuitous route, and if his hand found its way to the small of Neil’s back, nobody needed to know. They ended at Neil’s new bench, with the crate containing the skull waiting for him on the lift section. The mandible pieces were already roughly cleaned, sprawling across the rest of the bench top. Neil pulled on a pair of gloves and ran his fingers over the battery of teeth, memorizing the curve of them, the rise and fall of the ridges. Hundreds and hundreds of teeth, stacked on top of each other, the wear telling secrets to those willing to listen. There was a look on his face—a kind of reverence—that made Andrew feel like he was intruding. He started to turn away, but a light touch on his arm stopped him.

“I know Dr. Wymack wants me to go ho—to your place, but can we just unpack it first? I won’t start working on it, I just want to see it.”

Kevin sighed and grabbed the drill, Andrew the crowbar, and the three of them peeled off the wood to reveal the plaster beneath. Then the air filled with the buzz of the cast saw as Kevin worked it carefully through until finally—stone. The arch of the palate, a few teeth poking through the sandstone, a mystery at their fingertips.

“Holy shit,” Neil said, resting a hand against the side of the block. “Holy holy shit. It’s all right here, isn’t it?”

“It can wait.” Wymack’s voice was firm and Neil grimaced. “It’s going to take us months to get that thing properly cleaned. Go home, both of you. I want you here first thing tomorrow, so we can start making discoveries.” He waited, arms crossed, while Neil hefted his duffel off its spot on the floor where it had accumulated plaster dust, and Andrew grabbed his bag from his locker.

“And Neil?” Wymack called. They stopped in the doorway, Andrew blocking Neil’s exit; Neil’s fingers found his, and he relished the unfamiliar warmth as he linked them. “Welcome to PSU.”

Epilogue

_Three years later_

Pale light filtered through the window. Andrew squeezed his eyes against it, tightening his arm around the warm body curled against him. They needed to get up soon, but not yet. Not quite yet.

Neil made an activation noise like a cat and rolled to face him. Fingers found their way into his hair, and he tilted into the touch, nosing forward blindly until he found Neil’s mouth with his own. They kissed slowly, gently; not a prelude to anything but a quiet song all its own.

“We should get up,” Neil murmured against his lips.

Andrew hummed. “You can. I’ll just stay here.”

Neil huffed a laugh, and Andrew wrapped his leg around him to pull him closer. “Come on, this is your day as much as anyone’s.”

“It’s Wymack’s, not mine,” Andrew argued, but he blinked his eyes open. There it was, that familiar flutter of wonder at the sight of Neil nestled in the pillow, tousled and soft. He let himself trace Neil’s cheekbone with his thumb before sitting up with a groan.

Getting Neil into a suit was rather like putting socks on Aaron’s tiny laughing daughter, every time he thought he was done some part of it was a second away from being flung onto the floor. Finally, under threat of leaving him at home, Neil left his tie tied and his jacket on and Andrew was able to get dressed himself.

Despite Neil’s best efforts, they were on time. They let themselves in through the staff entrance, wandering hand in hand through the exhibits until they reached the huge atrium with the glorious glass roof arcing three stories above. Wymack was already there, looking completely out of his element in his own suit; nearby Kevin was reading through the speech for the thousandth time.

Neil released him, drawn like a magnet towards the towering skeleton. He had been there for the assembly, as each bone was slotted into its metal armature, but he still seemed struck dumb by it every time.

Andrew knew how he felt.

More people filtered in: Dan Wilds and Matt Boyd arm-in-arm; Allison Reynolds, looking haughty as always; a smattering of people Andrew barely recognized, from all parts of the biology department. Renee sidled up to him, orange juice in hand. “He’s actually wearing a suit, I see.”

“Practically had to use a tranquilizer gun to manage it.”

She laughed, and Andrew’s attention drifted back to Neil. He really was—beautiful. There was no other word for it, standing there with such fierce love in his eyes as he stared up at Donald suspended above him.

Before Andrew could get too maudlin, Wymack called everyone over. “You know I’m no good at speeches, but before we open this up to the public, I just needed to say something. You all have been working your asses off for literal years, getting this museum ready. We wouldn’t have this if it weren’t for each and every one of you. And the public might not give a shit about the sleep lost, the bruises and broken fingers, the crashed computers and lost data, the arguments and fights—some of which are still ongoing—“

There was a ripple of laughter, and more than a few nudges with elbows among the small crowd. Neil caught Andrew’s eye and grinned. Wymack cleared his throat. “The public might not know or care about all of that, but I do. You all have sacrificed to make this happen, and you should be damn proud of every inch of it. There are some legitimate discoveries here, some honest-to-god changes to existing science, and that’s because of you. You have changed the paradigm, and you should be damn proud of that.

“Now, let’s let these assholes in so they can take all that hard work for granted!”

Another round of laughter, then the doors were flung open and people streamed in, far more than Andrew ever could have expected. They filled the atrium like a flood, gathering around Kevin at his podium, gazing open-mouthed up at Donald’s enormous head with the stupid-looking crest ballooning at the top of its nose, at the Texacephale in its plexiglass case, at all the other bits of bone and teeth and skeleton casts and computer displays that ringed the room.

Andrew met Bee’s joyful eyes, picked out Aaron with Katelyn and little Ellie. Erik Klose’s blond head was bobbing above everybody else’s, Nicky and his brilliant smile a hairsbreadth away. As Kevin shuffled his notes, he met Andrew’s eye with a tiny fierce smile. Before Andrew could start to scan the crowd, Neil appeared at his elbow.

“Did you ever think we’d get here, Dr. Minyard?” Neil asked, nudging him with his shoulder. Andrew nudged him back. Memories flickered through his mind like an old newsreel, the heat of the desert, the sound of chisel on rock. Rain dripping through the bunkhouse roof. The overwhelming feeling of discovery; the strange sense of loss at the dismantling of an ancient ecosystem; the tedious work of uncovering finds millimeter by millimeter. The impossible night spent out under a shower of stars. And through it all, Neil, passionate and sharp as a blade.

His hand found Neil’s and squeezed, and Neil heard what he couldn’t say. Andrew felt his eyes burning as he looked around the crowd. It wasn’t perfect; there was still so much to learn, so much to teach, so many discoveries to be made. Aaron’s words echoed in his ears. He didn’t know if the stars had already fallen or were yet to fall, but the beauty around him was undeniable. He leaned into Neil as Kevin opened his mouth and began to speak.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *rubs back of neck awkwardly* I hope you all enjoyed this ending, and the glimpse of their future! As always, [HMU on Tumblr](https://fuzzballsheltiepants.tumblr.com) if you want to yell or say hi or become friends or whatever. My anxiety on this one has been pretty high - I love festivals and exchanges but they're still kinda scary - but I hope to go through and reply to comments here and there because they have meant everything to me. Love to all of you!

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed the start and this nerdy version of the Foxes! Comments and kudos are appreciated beyond what you can imagine. I struggle with anxiety about replying to comments but I will do my best, you have no idea how much they mean to me.


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